Northern District Of California Dismisses Class Action Suit Against Social Networking Company Without Prejudice, Rejecting An Argument That Failing To Share Data Constitutes Anticompetitive Conduct
03/28/2023
On March 8, 2023, Judge Haywood S. Gilliam, Jr. of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California granted a motion to dismiss a proposed antitrust class action lawsuit alleging that social networking company (the “Company”) has a monopoly in the professional social networking market, which it protects through a barrier to entry comprising the Company’s “data centralization and aggregation, its machine learning and AI infrastructure, and the inferred data it produce[s].” Crowder et al. v. LinkedIn Corporation, No. 22-cv-00237-HSG (N.D. Cal., Mar. 8, 2023). Plaintiffs alleged the Company violated Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Act by engaging in a “monopoly broth” of anticompetitive conduct, ranging from exclusive data sharing agreements to an alleged agreement with Facebook to divide markets. Granting the motion to dismiss, the Court ruled that none of the alleged activities amounted to anticompetitive conduct, either individually or on aggregate.