Facebook Faces $3.7B UK Lawsuit for Alleged Abuse of Market Dominance.
Facebook is currently attempting to prevent a $3.7 billion mass lawsuit from taking place in the UK, in relation to allegations of market dominance abuse. The lawsuit has been brought on behalf of 45 million Facebook users in Britain.
The legal academic, Liza Lovdahl Gormsen, leading the case, argues that Facebook users have not been adequately compensated for the value of their personal data that they have provided to use the platform. Gormsen’s lawyers state that users should receive compensation for the economic value they would have received if Facebook were not in a dominant position in the social networking market.
Meta Platforms Inc, the social media giant’s parent company, argues that the lawsuit is “entirely without merit” and should not be allowed to proceed. Meta claims that the lawsuit wrongly assumes that any excess profits equal a financial loss suffered by individual Facebook users and takes no account of the economic value of the service provided by Facebook.
The Competition Appeal Tribunal will make a decision on certifying the case as a collective proceeding, based on whether the individual cases can be dealt with together, rather than on their merits. In court, Ronit Kreisberger, representing Gormsen, argued that Meta’s data practices violate the prohibition on abusive conduct by dominant firms and that “there is unquestionably a case for Meta to answer at trial”.
On the other hand, Marie Demetriou, representing Meta, stated that Gormsen’s estimate of the potential claimants’ total losses, which includes interest, is “at the very least wildly inflated”.