Senior members of Congress have renewed calls to overhaul US competition law following the failure of two landmark attempts to break up Facebook.
Democrats and Republicans criticised the decision by a federal court on Monday to dismiss one complaint against the social media company by the Federal Trade Commission and another by individual states.
Several said the judgment illustrated the need to rewrite antitrust rules, with six major bills designed to rein in the power of Big Tech being debated on Capitol Hill.
Amy Klobuchar, Democratic chair of the Senate antitrust committee, tweeted: “The ruling shows why our antitrust laws need to be updated after years of bad precedent. We can’t meet the challenges of the modern digital economy with pared down agencies & limited legal tools.”
Ken Buck, the most senior Republican on the House antitrust committee, said: “Congress needs to provide additional tools and resources to our antitrust enforcers to go after Big Tech companies engaging in anti-competitive conduct.”
Many experts expect the FTC to refile its case against Facebook following the federal judge’s decision on Monday.
In a bruising ruling, Judge James Boasberg in Washington, DC had said the FTC’s lawsuit was “legally insufficient” and the federal agency had “failed to plead enough facts to plausibly establish” that Facebook had monopoly power over the social networking market.
“[W]hatever it may mean to the public, ‘monopoly power’ is a term of art under federal law with a precise economic meaning: the power to profitably raise prices or exclude competition in a properly defined market,” he wrote.
The FTC will have 30 days to file a new complaint. The regulator said in a statement that it was “closely reviewing the opinion and assessing the best option forward”.
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