Meta is not an illegal monopoly, judge rules

A judge has ruled that purchases by Meta did not violate antitrust laws.

A federal judge rejected the Federal Trade Commission’s effort to force Meta to divest its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, ending a five-year legal battle by dealing a blow to Government efforts to rein in the power of the Silicon Valley giant.

The ruling on Tuesday by US District Judge James E. Boasberg in DC agreed with Meta that its purchases of the photo-sharing app Instagram and messaging app WhatsApp, which it bought in 2012 and 2014, respectively, did not violate antitrust laws.

Boasberg found that the social media company isn’t a monopoly and faces a broad internet ecosystem of competitors rather than the far narrower one the Government defined. The FTC had argued that Meta held a monopoly in the “personal social networking” market that included Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. Using its market dominance, the company sought to buy or crush would-be competitors, while depriving users of more vibrant social media options, the FTC alleged.

Boasberg wrote that the FTC had “an uphill battle to establish the contours” of a market in which Meta had a monopoly.

“The Court ultimately concludes that the agency has not carried its burden,” he wrote.

“With apps surging and receding, chasing one craze and moving on from others, and adding new features with each passing year, the FTC has understandably struggled to fix the boundaries of Meta’s product market,” he wrote.

“Even so, it continues to insist that Meta competes with the same old rivals it has for the last decade, that the company holds a monopoly among that small set, and that it maintained that monopoly through anticompetitive acquisitions.”

Boasberg’s order is a victory for Meta, which has relied on Instagram and WhatsApp to bolster its reach among advertisers, younger audiences and users abroad. More than a decade later, those acquisitions have become crucial to the company’s AI strategy as it integrates its conversational chatbot across all of its social networks.

The high-profile trial elicited testimony from top executives, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and Instagram head Adam Mosseri, who were often confronted with internal correspondence from a decade ago about how the company approached competitive threats.

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