Meta won a landmark antitrust battle with the Federal Trade Commission on Tuesday after a federal judge ruled it has not monopolized the social media market at the center of the case.
US District Court Judge James Boasberg wrote that Meta had not unfairly cornered a market on “personal social networking,” a category that includes a narrow subset of social media apps including Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. The decision, which can be appealed by the FTC, means Meta will not immediately face demands to undo acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.
Boasberg noted that he’d warned the FTC that it faced an “uphill battle” in defining the market at issue and proving Meta held an illegal monopoly in it. Ultimately, he ruled, it failed to prove that Meta didn’t face substantial competition from other kinds of social media platforms, particularly after the rapid rise of TikTok — which Meta cited as a major factor in its defense. “The landscape that existed only five years ago when the Federal Trade Commission brought this antitrust suit has changed markedly,” Boasberg wrote. “While it once might have made sense to partition apps into separate markets of social networking and social media, that wall has since broken down.”
The FTC argued that Meta had maintained illegal monopoly power in the narrow sector of the social media market by gobbling up nascent competitors Instagram and WhatsApp it feared could threaten its dominance. But throughout the trial, the FTC was dogged by questions about whether it could claim Meta still had that illegal monopoly in the face of a greatly-changed social media landscape. Boasberg said the government had to prove current or imminent illegal monopolization, not just past dominance.
“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,” Boasberg 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. 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.”
This story is developing.
