A group of Facebook users asked the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to revive their dismissed antitrust lawsuit alleging Meta monopolized the market for “personal social network services” and used that dominance to harvest personal data without paying for it. The plaintiffs argue Meta would have had to pay users about $5 per month for their data absent a monopoly, a figure from economist Nichola Economides that the trial judge excluded as unsupported, gutting the case since it couldn't then prove the users were harmed. They contend a jury, not the judge, should have weighed Economides' testimony. The suit, which traces Meta's rise to its acquisitions of Instagram for $1B and WhatsApp for $19B, runs parallel to a separate FTC antitrust case Meta also defeated and is now appealing.
