The Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust buster said Americans lost a lot of privacy protection because a handful of large tech companies were allowed to go on an acquisition spree without greater scrutiny.
In a “60 Minutes” interview that aired Sunday, FTC Chair Lina Khan said allowing Big Tech to go through hundreds of acquisitions in the past several decades was a mistake that hurt Americans.
“In the technology markets, we went through a couple of decades where we saw over 800 acquisitions by the five big players, not a single one of which was blocked, and some of those we realized ended up leading to significant harm,” Khan said.
She acknowledged Facebook’s purchase of messaging app WhatsApp in 2014 for $19 billion as one example.
The FTC sued Facebook in 2020, accusing Mark Zuckerberg’s company of engaging in anticompetitive practices by buying Instagram and WhatsApp. A district judge in Washington, DC, dismissed the complaint in June 2021, stating that the agency did not provide enough evidence that Facebook established a monopoly.
The case was revived after the FTC refiled the complaint a month later. In another motion to dismiss the lawsuit in April, Facebook, now Meta, said it faces plenty of competition from rivals like TikTok, X, and YouTube. The company also said in a press statement that the FTC reviewed the acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp years ago.
“The decision to revisit done deals is tantamount to announcing that no sale will ever be final,” the company said.
An FTC spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment. A Meta spokesperson declined to provide comment.
Khan argued in the “60 Minutes” interview that purchases like these weakened Americans’ privacy guardrails.
“Just to give you a concrete example, there were companies that were offering Americans greater privacy, and they were promising that we’re not going to use your data, we’re not going to sell it, we’re not going to spy on you, everywhere all the time,” Khan said. “After some of those firms were bought up by one of the big guys, all of those data privacy policies changed overnight, and so Americans lost those privacy protections.”
In 2021, WhatsApp changed its privacy terms to force users to share their personal data with Facebook. Ireland’s privacy watchdog fined the company $266 million for issues related to transparency around how WhatsApp shared its data with Facebook.
A WhatsApp spokesperson told BI at the time that the company disagreed with the decision and that the penalties were “entirely disproportionate.”
Since her appointment by President Joe Biden in 2021, Khan has led an aggressive antitrust fight against large corporations, drawing the ire of Democratic and Republican business leaders. An FTC spokesperson told CNN in 2023 that, under Khan, the agency has investigated or sued to stop more than three dozen merger proposals.
Some billionaire Democratic donors to Kamala Harris’ campaign, including LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, have pushed to oust Khan under a potential new administration. But Khan’s fight has also attracted unlikely supporters from the other side of the aisle, including Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, who said in an interview with Newsmax that his party “can’t be whores for big business and be the voice of the working class at the same time.”
Those supporters have billed themselves “Khanservatives,” The Wall Street Journal reported.
