{"id":130698,"date":"2020-12-11T00:20:08","date_gmt":"2020-12-10T21:20:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/ftc-faces-shoestring-budget-in-antitrust-case-against-facebook\/"},"modified":"2020-12-11T00:20:08","modified_gmt":"2020-12-10T21:20:08","slug":"ftc-faces-shoestring-budget-in-antitrust-case-against-facebook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/ftc-faces-shoestring-budget-in-antitrust-case-against-facebook\/","title":{"rendered":"#FTC faces shoestring budget in antitrust case against Facebook"},"content":{"rendered":"

“#FTC faces shoestring budget in antitrust case against Facebook<\/a><\/strong>”
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Facebook is amassing big legal guns in a looming battle with the US government over antitrust allegations \u2014 but the feds are working on a shoestring budget.<\/p>\n

Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s giant social network \u2014 which on Wednesday got sued by the Federal Trade Commission for allegedly using its deals to buy Instagram and WhatsApp<\/a> to sidestep competition \u2014 has tapped some of the nation\u2019s top litigators for the battle, The Post has learned.<\/p>\n

Those include white-shoe law firm Davis Polk and its New York-based partner James Rouhandeh, who in 2018 was named \u201cLitigator of the Year\u201d by American Lawyer magazine. Sources said Zuckerberg is also expected to tap Beltway bigwig Mark Hansen, a Harvard-trained attorney who successfully defended Verizon from antitrust allegations by smaller phone networks in a 2004 case that went to the US Supreme Court.<\/p>\n

Sources say the FTC\u2019s antitrust case, meanwhile, will be led by in-house counsel Daniel Matheson, who was named the agency\u2019s deputy trial chief only last year after joining the feds in 2016. In 2018, Matheson earned a salary of $136,000, according to public records.<\/p>\n

The FTC is bringing the case after its executive director David Robbins reportedly announced \u201cbelt tightening\u201d in late October amid the coronavirus crisis. Cutbacks included a hiring freeze, encouraging leave without pay and possibly scrapping year-end bonuses, according to online news<\/a>letter Big Technology<\/a>.<\/p>\n

An FTC spokesperson declined to comment, but the timing of the cuts to the FTC\u2019s budget, pegged at slightly more than $330 million this year, couldn\u2019t be worse, says William Kovacic, a professor at George Washington University who was an FTC commissioner from 2006 to 2011. <\/p>\n

\u00a0\u201cIt\u2019s entirely legitimate to look at the lawyer matchups,\u201d Kovacic told The Post. \u201cThe quality of the legal team is essential.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the case of the FTC, insiders say its staffer Matheson \u2014 who graduated from University of Michigan Law School in 2004 \u2014 earned a scrappy reputation as he prosecuted an antitrust case against giant chipmaker Qualcomm. In a May 2019 ruling for the FTC, US District Judge Lucy Koh noted that top Qualcomm execs including co-founder Irwin Jacobs were well-coached by their lawyers, but \u201cvery reluctant and slow to answer, and at times cagey\u201d when cross examined by Matheson and his team.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cDan has one speed and that is being aggressive,\u201d a DC source said of Matheson\u2019s style in court.<\/p>\n

The FTC\u2019s victory over Qualcomm was unanimously overturned by a US Appeals Court in August, who rejected the agency\u2019s argument that Qualcomm\u2019s requiring customers to sign licensing agreements \u2014 a practice that sparked a high-profile spat with Apple \u2014 was anticompetitive. Still, some insiders gave credit to Matheson, who took the case to trial despite Apple settling and the Justice Department siding with Qualcomm.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, Facebook\u2019s own chief lawyer Jennifer Newstead \u2014 a former legal adviser to the US State Department who is best known for selling the Patriot Act to Congress \u2014 has assembled a formidable team, insiders say.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Rouhandeh was cited for his persistence in representing law firm Proskauer Rose and overturning a case alleging it had covered up Allen Stanford\u2019s $7 billion Ponzi scheme. He also represented Morgan Stanley in the 2012 Facebook IPO for allegedly taking excessive insider share profits by understating Facebook revenue. That case ended in a settlement.<\/p>\n

One DC legal source branded the FTC\u2019s decision not to hire outside counsel for the Facebook case \u201ca tactical mistake.\u201d In big cases, the government has frequently hired outside counsel, such as when the Justice Department hired David Boies in its successful antitrust case against Microsoft. The FTC also brought in outside counsel in a case against Intel, and the chipmaker ended up settling charges that it was stifling competition.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But Seth Bloom, a longtime general<\/a> counsel for the US Senate Antitrust Subcommittee, said the FTC may have little choice this time.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s very expensive and these agencies are under budgetary pressure,\u201d Bloom said. \u201cOf course, they will be up against the best lawyers in the country.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even in smaller cases, the FTC has a mixed track record of late. Earlier this week, a federal judge in Philadelphia handed the FTC a loss, rejecting its request to temporarily stop Thomas Jefferson Hospital\u2019s bid to buy Einstein Health Care Network.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, Bloom also notes that the FTC in 2016 successfully blocked a merger between Staples and Office Depot \u2014 and did it with its own legal team.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fact and law will decide the case,\u201d Bloom said.\n <\/p><\/div>\n

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Source<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“#FTC faces shoestring budget in antitrust case against Facebook” Facebook is amassing big legal guns in a looming battle with the US government over antitrust allegations \u2014 but the feds are working on a shoestring budget. Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s giant social network \u2014 which on Wednesday got sued by the Federal Trade Commission for allegedly using…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":130699,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/nypost.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2020\/12\/facebooks-big-legal-guns2.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1200","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[70897],"tags":[83265,70874,4974,74382,70875,83344,70446,5077],"class_list":["post-130698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-12-10-20","tag-anti-trust-law","tag-facebook","tag-federal-trade-commission","tag-ftc","tag-law-firms","tag-lawsuits","tag-mark-zuckerberg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130698"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130698\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/130699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}