Facebook aims to stop a $3.7 billion public protest against market control in the UK

Facebook on Monday sought a court order in London to halt a class action lawsuit that could be worth up to 3 billion pounds over claims that the social media company used its dominating position to profit from the personal data of its users.

Approximately 45 million Facebook users in the U.K. have filed a class action lawsuit against Meta Platforms Limited, the parent corporation of the Facebook group.

Liza Lovdahl Gormsen, a legal scholar who is pursuing the action, claimed that Facebook users were not fairly compensated for the value of the personal information they had to submit in order to use the platform.

Users should be compensated for the commercial benefit they would have gained if Facebook did not hold a monopoly status in the social network sector, according to her attorneys.

However, according to Meta, the case is “totally without merit” and cannot go further. The claimed damages, according to its attorneys, disregard Facebook’s “economic benefit.”

The attorneys for Lovdahl Gormsen requested certification of the lawsuit by the Competition Appeal Tribunal on Monday under the UK’s collective procedures regime, which is comparable to the class action regime in the US.

The court will decide whether or not to authorize collective actions based on this determination rather than on the grounds of the specific cases.

The tribunal was informed by Lovdahl Gormsen’s attorney, Ronit Kreisberger, that “Meta’s data methods infringe the restriction on abusive conduct by dominant corporations.”

Kreisberger asserted that Meta would have a case to defend at trial.

However, attorneys for Meta argued that the case incorrectly believes that any “extra profits” it might make are equivalent to a loss of money for specific Facebook users.

According to Marie Demetriou in court records, this strategy “takes no account whatsoever of the enormous economic value of the service supplied by Facebook.”

She claimed that the three billion pounds in net losses estimated by Lovdahl Gormsen for potential claimants, including interest, are “at the absolute least massively overstated.”