Court Dismisses Chat Holdco’s Antitrust Suit Against Facebook

Judge Beth Labson Freeman of the Northern District of California issued an order granting Facebook’s motion to dismiss with prejudice the antitrust lawsuit brought against it filed by three web developers – Reveal Chat Holdco, USA Technology and Management Services, and Beehive Biometric – finding the plaintiffs’ claims time-barred.

Previously, the plaintiffs sued Facebook in January 2020 for antitrust violations alleging that it shut out the competition. Specifically, Facebook was sued for “removing access to a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) in 2015 that Plaintiffs relied on for their mobile applications.” In June 2020, Facebook filed a reply to its motion to dismiss, after which, the court dismissed the suit with partial leave to amend. Facebook then moved to dismiss the first amended complaint, which the plaintiffs opposed.

Specifically, according to the order, the court previously found that the plaintiffs’ claims “were time-barred by the four-year statute of limitations for antitrust claims and that Plaintiffs had not adequately pled fraudulent concealment in part because they had not plausibly alleged they were without actual or constructive knowledge of the facts giving rise to their claims,” among other things, but granted them leave to amend for the issue of fraudulent concealment, which would toll the statute of limitations. Facebook filed another motion to dismiss the amended complaint, also asserting that the plaintiffs’ claims are time-barred.

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