Facebook has 2.7 billion members worldwide, making it the world’s largest social network. But Boasberg said prosecutors hadn’t done a convincing enough job in defining what social networking is — or explaining their calculation that Facebook controls more than 60 percent of that market.
Social networking “services are free to use, and the exact metes and bounds of what even constitutes [social networking] — i.e., which features of a company’s mobile app or website are included in that definition and which are excluded — are hardly crystal clear,” Boasberg ruled in an opinion dismissing the FTC’s complaint. “The FTC’s inability to offer any indication of the metric(s) or method(s) it used to calculate Facebook’s market share renders its vague ‘60%-plus’ assertion too speculative and conclusory to go forward.”
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