LinkedIn executives can be questioned in monopoly lawsuit, judge rules

Investing.com -- A federal judge ruled Tuesday that current and former LinkedIn executives can be questioned as part of a lawsuit that accuses the company of illegally monopolizing the professional social media market.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Laurel Beeler in San Francisco ordered that plaintiffs can depose LinkedIn's current chief executive Daniel Shapero for four hours and question former CEO Reid Hoffman for three hours. Hoffman, a billionaire co-founder of LinkedIn, sold the company to Microsoft for $26.2 billion in 2016.

LinkedIn had asked Beeler to prevent the plaintiffs from questioning the executives, arguing they lacked first-hand information and that such information should be obtained from other sources first. Beeler determined the plaintiffs met the requirements necessary to question top corporate executives.

The lawsuit, filed in 2022, claims LinkedIn unlawfully controlled more than 97% of the professional networking market and used its dominance to charge excessive prices for premium subscriptions. LinkedIn has called the claims baseless and said no amount of additional discovery will change that. Microsoft is not a defendant in the case.

LinkedIn agreed last year to settle the case, but U.S. District Judge Haywood Gilliam Jr. in Oakland rejected the proposed settlement, citing problems with the deal. The agreement would have required LinkedIn to change certain business practices but provided no monetary compensation to users.

Gilliam has not yet ruled on whether to allow the lawsuit to move forward as a class action. In court filings, the plaintiffs said there are potentially hundreds of thousands of class members. The social networking platform has grown to more than 1.3 billion members since its sale to Microsoft.

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