Meta won a major antitrust lawsuit against the federal government on Tuesday, with a judge ruling the company’s purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp did not grant it a social networking monopoly.
The Federal Trade Commission attempted to make Meta sell off the two popular applications to create greater diversity in the market, but D.C. District Judge James Boasberg ruled in the company’s favor.
“Whether or not Meta enjoyed monopoly power in the past, though, the agency must show that it continues to hold such power now. The Court’s verdict today determines that the FTC has not done so,” Boasberg wrote in his decision.
Meta bought Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. The government’s crucial evidence was hundreds of internal emails in which Meta executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed their strategy of purchasing competitors instead of fighting them.
“Even if some new competitors springs [sic] up, buying Instagram, Path, Foursquare, etc. now will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get close to their scale again,” Zuckerberg wrote in one 2012 email.
However, Boasberg said Meta’s past actions were unimportant to the case; what really mattered was whether the company currently acts as a monopoly. He pointed to competition from other social networking platforms, such as TikTok and YouTube.
The FTC began the case against Meta during President Trump’s first administration and continued it through the Biden administration and into Trump’s second term.
Antitrust lawsuits against massive tech companies have been one of the few policies the two leaders have agreed on. The FTC previously won two similar cases against Google, and a comparable suit against Amazon remains on the books.
With News Wire Services
