The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) antitrust expert said Americans have lost much of their data protection because a handful of large technology companies have been allowed to go on a shopping spree without major oversight.
In an interview with “60 Minutes” broadcast on Sunday, FTC Chair Lina Khan said it was a mistake to allow big technology companies to make hundreds of takeovers over the past decades and that it had hurt Americans.
“In the technology markets, there have been over 800 acquisitions by the big five players over several decades, and not a single one of them has been blocked. We found that some of them ultimately led to significant damage,” Khan said.
As an example, she cited Facebook’s purchase of the messaging app WhatsApp in 2014 for $19 billion.
The FTC sued Facebook in 2020, accusing Mark Zuckerberg’s company of engaging in anti-competitive practices by purchasing Instagram and WhatsApp. A district judge in Washington, DC, dismissed the lawsuit in June 2021, saying the agency had not provided sufficient evidence that Facebook had established a monopoly position.
The case was reopened after the FTC refiled the complaint a month later. In another motion to dismiss the case in In April, Facebook, now Meta, said it faced a lot of competition from rivals like TikTok, X and YouTube. The company also said in a press release that the FTC had reviewed its acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp years ago.
“The decision to re-examine transactions that have already been completed is tantamount to announcing that no sale will ever be final,” the company said.
A spokesperson for the FTC did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Meta declined to comment.
Khan argued in the “60 Minutes” interview that purchases like these would weaken Americans’ privacy protections.
“To give you just one concrete example, there were companies that were offering Americans more privacy, promising that they wouldn’t use their data, they wouldn’t sell it, they wouldn’t spy on them everywhere, all the time,” Khan said. “After some of those companies were bought by one of the big guys, all those privacy policies changed overnight, and Americans lost that privacy.”
In 2021, WhatsApp changed its privacy policy to force users to share their personal information with Facebook. Ireland’s data protection authority fined the company $266 million for issues related to transparency regarding the way WhatsApp shares its data with Facebook.
A WhatsApp spokesperson told BI at the time that the company did not agree with the decision and that the penalties were “completely disproportionate.”
Since her appointment by President Joe Biden in 2021, Khan has waged an aggressive antitrust fight against major companies, drawing the ire of Democratic and Republican business leaders. An FTC spokesperson told CNN in 2023 that under Khan, the agency had investigated or sued to stop more than three dozen merger proposals.
Some billionaire Democratic donors to Kamala Harris’ campaign, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, have pushed for Khan to be released under a possible new administration. But Khan’s fight has also attracted unexpected supporters from across the aisle, including Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, who said in an interview with Newsmax that his party “cannot be whores for big business and the voice of the working class at the same time.”
These supporters called themselves “Khan Conservatives,” the Wall Street Journal reported.
