#FTC departments at odds over Facebook antitrust investigation

Departments inside the Federal Trade Commission are at odds over how to prepare the grounds to take action against Facebook in its investigation of whether the social media giant violates antitrust laws, according to a report on Monday.

The conflict, according to Axios, involves the FTC’s Bureau of Competition, which is leading the investigation, and the Office of Policy Planning, which was initially charged with developing guidelines for antitrust reviews of tech firms.

They are clashing over how to apply older competition standards to the freewheeling market for online goods when it comes to the Silicon Valley tech firms.

The Bureau of Competition has now taken a leading role in coming up with the guidelines, Axios reported, seeking to clarify what “constitutes anti-competitive harms to address tech companies’ business models.”

More definitive and clearer guidelines would provide the FTC with a basis to take action against Facebook if it decides to.

“The policy people live in a world where there is a one-size-fits all formula,” a person familiar with the friction told Axios. “They want it to be less messy, but the enforcers recognize that antitrust is inherently messy because it’s fact-based.”

Among its investigations into Facebook, the FTC is reviewing 10 years of the social media behemoth’s acquisitions believing them to be at the crux of their social media domination.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg are slated to testify next Monday before a House committee, along with other tech officials from Amazon, Apple and Google, and the FTC is mulling taking sworn testimony from the Facebook executives as part of its investigation, the Wall Street Journal reported.

The investigation, which the FTC had said would conclude by November’s election, is now expected to extend into the new year, the New York Times reported.