FTC Motion Partly Granted to Compel Meta’s ‘Further’ Discovery Answers
Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg for the District of Columbia signed a memorandum opinion Wednesday (docket 1:20-cv-03590) granting “only in part” the FTC’s motion to compel Meta to produce “further supplemental answers” to 14 agency interrogatories and their subsections.…
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The FTC’s antitrust case alleges Meta unlawfully maintained a monopoly over the market for personal social network services by acquiring competitors and potential competitors, specifically Instagram and WhatsApp. At issue in the motion to compel is the additional information that the FTC seeks into Meta’s assertions that the Instagram and WhatsApp buys resulted in procompetitive benefits. The procompetitive-benefits argument is “the centerpiece of Meta’s affirmative defense to the FTC’s claims,” said Boasberg’s memorandum opinion. But with the May 22 “merits-discovery” deadline “quickly approaching,” the FTC “has been limited throughout the discovery period” by knowing only examples of Meta’s procompetitive-benefits defense, it said. Though Meta intends to call expert witnesses to testify about the procompetitive benefits of its acquisitions, that doesn’t alter its Rule 33 obligation “to provide complete interrogatory responses to questions asking it to state its contentions or to provide facts on which they are based,” it said. It may be that a party’s experts will rely on facts to support the party’s contentions, but it’s not “a valid objection to claim that interrogatories asking about facts and contentions” constitute premature expert discovery, it said. In a “spoiler alert” prelude to Boasberg's point-by-point analysis of the interrogatories and Meta’s responses to them, “each side wins some and loses some,” said his memorandum opinion. Meta’s response to Interrogatory No. 10, for example, provides only a high-level summary and examples of the procompetitive benefits of the acquisitions, it said: “That is not enough.” If providing a complete list of the benefits is impossible, the judge ordered Meta to “certify that its response is full and complete to the best of its knowledge and belief,” it said. The judge, on the other hand, denied the FTC’s request for a complete Meta response to Interrogatory No. 11, seeking to probe Meta’s claims about the benefits that its Integrity program yielded. The interrogatory, “read literally, seeks stunning detail and warranted Meta’s initial refusal to answer it in accordance with its express terms,” said the judge.