URS 4EVER

In a 2019 New York University Law Review article — cheekily titled “Antitrust and Commitment Issues” — then law student Evan Michael Gilbert argued that Match Group could legally be seen as a harmful monopoly. Gilbert’s legal analysis is one of the few documents clearly delineating the antitrust case against Match Group.

“The antitrust authorities have largely abdicated their role to scrutinize mergers in zero-priced industries,” he writes, referring to industries like online dating in which you can download apps for free before then being prodded to spend money for perks and privileges. In turn, Gilbert says, companies like Match Group have been able to gobble up their competition without any meaningful pushback or oversight, leaving consumers to “pay the price for this increased concentration.”

Match Group grew out of one the first online dating sites, Match.com, which launched in 1995 before being acquired in 1999 by the massive holding company IAC Inc. In 2009, IAC created the subsidiary Match Group just before apps like Tinder and Hinge began emerging and revolutionizing the industry by offering people the chance to post profiles and meet one another on cellphone apps. In 2020, IAC spun Match Group out as its own company.

Now Tinder and Hinge are Match Group properties. In fact, over its lifespan in its various iterations, Match Group has acquired or absorbed over two dozen of its own rivals and now reportedly operates over forty brands altogether.

Match Group declined to provide a full list of its brands or share the exact number it owns and operates. The known brands range from established general-audience apps like OkCupid and Plenty of Fish to newer apps like Chispa (“MADE FOR LATINOS”) and BLK (“Dating For Black Singles”). Along with one competitor, Bumble (which it tried and failed to purchase in 2017), Match Group controls nearly the entire industry.

“While Match Group’s portfolio companies own some well-known brands, our brands represent a small subset of the many dating and social discovery services available today, from established players to emerging startups and niche platforms,” said a Match Group spokesperson in a statement to the Lever. “Match Group competes not only against those many services, but also with numerous other ways that people meet and connect, including social media, professional networks, and offline interactions — further demonstrating the competitiveness of the broader relationship landscape.”

In a market that was genuinely competitive, Gilbert writes, dating apps would be fighting to create matches and then advertising their success rates. But in our current climate, he argues, dating apps can instead aim for “the most profitable trade-off”: providing users with low-quality matches and convincing them that if they just spend more time on the app, they will find the one. As they do so, Gilbert asserts, Match Group can also “leverage its power over people’s love lives to hike the price of its premium service” and “leverage its power over the quality of the app to pressure more consumers to pay for the premium model.”

In 2023, Clarkson Law Firm sued Google for using copyrighted content to train its artificial intelligence models. Surprisingly, the response to that lawsuit led directly to their class-action lawsuit against Match Group. “We heard from hundreds of people interested in pursuing claims against tech companies,” says Giordano, the Clarkson attorney, with many “sharing a common theme: putting profits over people, regardless of the law.” Specifically, over and over, people wanted to complain about Match Group.

The lawsuit — filed in 2024 on behalf of a group of former Match Group customers — states that as Match Group’s dominance has grown over the last decade, the company has “altered social reality.”

The underpinning legal argument is that Match Group is unlawfully misleading its users and therefore violating false advertising and deceptive trade practices laws. The lawsuit also argues that Match Group should be compelled to warn users of the addictive nature of its apps and to stop advertising false promises.

“Users invest their time and money into the Platform” looking for a relationship, the complaint states, “and, crucially, freedom from the Platform.” Via “dopamine-manipulating product features,” users become “gamblers locked in a search for psychological rewards that Match makes elusive on purpose.” Those features include push notifications that bully users back onto the app out of fear of missing a connection and “inventive rewards” that “punish users from disengaging and rewards compulsive users.”

On Tinder, one Match Group app, users have been pushed to “like” more than one hundred profiles a day and are told that if they use the app daily, they may be designated as “Top Picks” to other users, the lawsuit points out. Conversely, users have been warned that not using the app regularly may mean that their profile will be shown to fewer and fewer people.

Once a user is convinced to get back on the app, Tinder’s algorithm has been alleged to manipulate the user’s experience. According to a theory shared in Gilbert’s article, “The first few profiles a user sees when opening the app have been deemed ‘more attractive,’ to convince a user that attractive people are only a swipe away, and the next round of profiles tend to be ‘instant matches,’ to boost the user’s confidence.” One of Tinder’s founders has said he was inspired by the psychologist B. F. Skinner, the “father of operant conditioning” who trained pigeons to act like “gamblers,” pecking at random for food.

Reporters and dating experts have written thousands and thousands of words on consumers’ growing distaste for dating apps. Antitrust concerns are rarely mentioned. Match Group is more likely to be referenced as a brand name than can be trusted. In a 2024 piece on the troubles faced by people fifty and older who are dating online, The New York Times Magazine credulously quoted Helen Fisher, the “chief scientific adviser to Match,” who explained that older users may be having difficulty finding love on the apps because they are “pickier.”

“Our focus remains on innovation, user safety, and creating meaningful connections for our own users and platforms,” noted the Match Group spokesperson. “The success of our business depends on providing the best experience for users in a landscape where they have many choices.”

But as Clarkson Law Firm’s lawsuit argues, Match Group’s own practices — which it has developed as it has grown to dominate the market — may be leading people to turn on their dating apps. Match Group’s primary objective, the lawsuit argues, is not to grow its overall user base but to transform as many of its nonpaying users as possible into paying users.

The company’s financial statements show that Match Group has recently been able to increase its overall revenue, despite a dip in new consumers, by increasing the amount of revenue it makes per person. This fact, Clarkson Law Firm’s lawsuit argues, proves that for Match Group, “attracting new users with an effective product has proven to be less profitable than turning existing users into addicts.”

BE MINE

As Match has tightened its grip on its users, it’s also crowded out viable alternatives.

Shahzad Younas, the founder of Muzz, a dating app for Muslims with over ten million users, saw this firsthand. When originally launched in 2015, the company was known as Muzmatch. The use of the word “match” was enough for Match Group to come knocking with litigation. The multiyear legal battle encompassed multiple lawsuits both in the United Kingdom, where Muzz is based, and the United States. In 2022, Younas lost an appeal and reluctantly rebranded his company as Muzz.

The face-off with Match Group was, Younas says, “one of the most stressful periods of my life.” He adds, with a smile: “I didn’t have a gray beard then. Now I do!” Ultimately Muzz spent $2 million on legal fees and settlements. Many new companies might not survive that kind of expenditure, Younas says: “They can drain startups with legal fees.”

Younas believes that the whole ordeal was a bullying tactic to convince him to sell the company. While simultaneously engaged in litigation, Match Group made multiple offers to buy Muzz, topping out at $35 million. (After first attempting to purchase Bumble, their primary competitor, Match Group similarly filed a patent infringement lawsuit. In response, Bumble called them “bullies.”)

At some point, Younas says, Match Group offered Muzz a deal: sign an agreement that you won’t sell to a Match Group competitor, and we’ll leave you alone. Younas said no.

“That’s how they operate,” Younas says. “They own the market and they use their clout to cement their position. There’s no sense of competition.” Since attempting to purchase Muzz, Younas points out, Match Group has bought the Muslim dating apps Harmonica (which they later renamed to Hawaya and then shut down) and Salams.

Muzz is designed to get users “high-quality conversations that lead to marriage,” Younas says, and does so through features limiting the number of conversations a person can have at any given time. More than 600,000 people have left the app after finding their life partner, he reports proudly.

“I’m a practicing Muslim,” Younas says. “This means a lot to me, to genuinely solve the problem, to help people find their life partner.” (As a side note, Younas points out that Muzz also stands out in the dating app industry as a rare online space where you can post support for Palestine without any fear of censorship.)

Match Group properties, on the other hand, “are highly gamified” across many of their various platforms, says Younas. “A lot of people have no idea that that’s the same company running so many apps,” he adds. But to those paying attention, “their antics are very clear.”

Is Match Group a monopoly? “From my observations, from my own experience — yes,” says Younas. “They tried to buy us, we said no, and then they proceeded with litigation.”

MY HERO

For Giordano, his firm’s legal action against Match Group fits naturally alongside its artificial intelligence cases and its work as a public interest firm “fighting Big Tech.” Giordano knows that Match Group is “not typically considered Big Tech” but, he says, “look at their market share in the dating industry.” Ultimately it was Match’s colossal size alongside their alleged predatory business practices that compelled Clarkson Law Firm to “take action.”

Summing up the injuries to the plaintiffs they represent, the lawsuit states that Match Group users “suffer proximate harm from Defendant’s false representations,” are “manipulated financially,” and are at risk of “becoming addicted to the Platforms, impacting their everyday well-being and mental health.”

At the end of 2024, a federal judge in San Francisco sided with Match Group’s argument that the terms of services signed by the plaintiffs barred them from pursuing a class-action lawsuit and sent Clarkson Law Firm’s case to arbitration. In a statement, Clarkson Law Firm said, “The fight to hold an effective monopoly purposely designed to foment dating app addiction has driven critical conversation around the globe, and our clients continue to evaluate all options to hold Match accountable for a business model” that has “psychological manipulation at its core.”

Says Giordano, “We’re not surprised that a company with so much market power would seek to unilaterally force clients into secret arbitration tribunals outside the much-needed sunlight of the public court system.” Going through the public courts means discovery, the legal process by which plaintiffs are compelled to turn over pertinent information.

“The discovery process is where all these facts [would] come to light,” Giordano says. “[We’d] be able to depose the technology teams that are responsible. We think the public needs to see how these algorithms are designed.”

If and when that day ever comes and people get to look under the dating apps’ hoods, Giordano says it could be revelatory: “You can only imagine what you can find.”

TRUE LOVE

The Federal Trade Commission — the federal government agency responsible for protecting consumers — has been engaged in ongoing litigation against Match Group for years. The agency believes that Match Group has lured consumers to pay for its apps by sending them fake profiles of people allegedly interested in them.

As the agency stated in a September 2019 press release, “Many consumers purchased subscriptions” hoping “to meet a real user who might be ‘the one’” but, instead, came across fake accounts, ones Match Group “had already flagged as likely to be fraudulent.” The case is ongoing, with the agency currently engaged in pretrial proceedings.

How aggressively the agency pursues the case under the Trump administration, however, is yet to be determined. (To date, Trump has not yet fully hollowed out this particular government agency; its current chair, Andrew Ferguson, has even backed certain initiatives of his famously ambitious predecessor, Lina Khan). But other legal avenues may be available.

Brendan Benedict is a litigation attorney based in Washington, DC, who has litigated antitrust cases against Apple and Google. He says that watching Match Group buy up competitors — “all the acquisitions, happening one after another” — has led him to consider bringing a case against the company himself.

Benedict has ultimately been deterred by the arbitration clauses that users sign in order to access the apps, the same ones that impacted Clarkson Law Firm’s case. But if state attorneys general take up legal action, Benedict says, there may be a path to avoid arbitration, since states may be able to circumvent those arbitration agreements.

Benedict points to a legal argument called parens patriae under which a state attorney general “sues in the name of its citizens for economic harm.” Similar approaches have been used in multistate legal actions tackling alleged price-fixing in everything from online advertising to medicine. If such a case is successful against Match Group, states could win damages based on the company’s alleged bilking of its consumers.

“There’s definitely evidence that raises the concern that Match has become an unlawful monopoly through acquisitions,” Benedict says. “Whether or not they have done that as a matter of law is going to turn on the evidence that a plaintiff is able to find.”

When it comes to the larger conversation around and media coverage of antitrust, Benedict believes that Match Group flies under the radar because of flagrant monopolistic behavior in other, more prominent fields like health care. “But the antitrust laws don’t discriminate,” he says. “They apply to every industry. We want free markets in all our product markets. If you’re a consumer looking for love and you’re being taxed in an anticompetitive way, it matters a lot.”

As Giordano puts it, for Match Group, “the incentives to do right, to do good, just don’t exist — it knows the consumer has little other choice. And given that Match is so powerful, the barriers to entry for players that would do this right — in a legal and ethical way — are too high.”

But Giordano adds, “Dating apps could be done in a nonmanipulative way.” He hopes that, in the long term, his work on the lawsuit “helps create space in the market for people who do right by consumers.”

In the meantime, there’s real life.

At the “Rescue Me” singles party, folks scream-talk over the music and revert to high-school-style dance-floor makeouts. Amid the festivities, snatches of endearingly fumbling conversations rise above the din: “I think I like you already!” “You got muscles!” “Never married, never engaged, no kids!” In one corner, a woman in a jean jacket pops out of a booth to point and shout at a guy — “Comere comere comere you!” — until she successfully bullies him into talking to her friend.

In person, temporarily out of reach of Match Group, people seemed genuinely, despite the odds, to be having a really nice time.