Netflix and Meta sued for alleged backroom deal to “kneecap” Facebook Watch

Netflix and Meta, née Facebook, are two great tastes that taste together. This is especially true when talking about anticompetitive, monopolistic flavors that provide credence to the theory that much of the American economy is just billionaires pooping money back and forth forever. In a new lawsuit, Meta and Netflix stand accused of agreeing to a backroom deal and intentionally “hobbling” Meta’s streaming service, Facebook Watch, to benefit Netflix.

A lawsuit filed in Illinois accuses both companies of engaging in anticompetitive behavior for intentionally sunsetting Facebook Watch to give its share of the streaming market to Netflix. In return, Netflix provided Facebook with customer data and spent hundreds of millions of dollars on Meta’s targeted ads. Meta has denied the charges, calling it “baseless” and claiming there is “no evidence” for such a deal. Meta would never commit an antitrust violation, such as buying up fledgling social media services that it deems competition.

This is per The Hollywood Reporter. In 2017, Meta launched Facebook Watch, the brief streaming home of I Want My Phone Back, the 33rd season of The Real World, a Humans Of New York series, and Red Table Talk. It’s not like Facebook Watch ever stood much of a chance, but perhaps that was by design. The idea was to leverage Meta’s ad business by harvesting streaming data from its users that the company could squeeze for targeted ads. The only problem was Netflix co-founder and executive chairman Reed Hastings sat on Facebook’s board. Meta, which publicly committed to spending more than a billion dollars on content for the doomed streamer, pivoted and slowly killed off Watch. The service was quietly smothered to death last year.

“Facebook was willing to kneecap its Watch video service in exchange for extremely valuable consumer data from Netflix as well as Netflix’s dramatic increase in its spending on Facebook advertising,” the lawsuit says. Additionally, the agreement gave Netflix the power to—get this—raise its prices because the company had one less streamer to compete with. The lawsuit is a class action open to anyone who has subscribed to Netflix since 2017. TUDUM!