LinkedIn Gets Tentative Win in Antitrust Suit on Data Practices

LinkedIn Corp. scored a preliminary victory against antitrust claims over its alleged scheme to corner the professional networking market through its data sharing practices and a noncompete pact with Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc.

Judge Haywood S. Gilliam Jr. dismissed the case without prejudice, finding that the Facebook-related allegations were untimely and the claims targeting LinkedIn’s “anti-scraping” policies—its efforts to prevent mass data collection by bots—fell short of showing harm to competition. Meta isn’t named as a defendant.

The lawsuit’s headline theory that LinkedIn colluded to divvy up the social media sector with Facebook echoes major antitrust cases that target ...