In a major victory for Meta, the social media giant was recently found not guilty of breaking federal antitrust laws with its acquisitions of photo-sharing app Instagram and messaging platform WhatsApp.
It has been five years since the Federal Trade Commission was joined by 46 states in filing the case against Meta, then known as Facebook, in the waning days of President Donald Trump‘s first administration. The suit alleged that the company’s 2012 purchase of Instagram and 2014 purchase of WhatsApp were anticompetitive and illegal. U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg dismissed the original complaint in 2021 but allowed an amended lawsuit to be filed later that year. The trial, featuring testimony from Meta co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and former COO Sheryl Sandberg, took place earlier this year.
The FTC charged that Meta employed a “buy-or-bury” strategy of purchasing more mobile-friendly platforms to avoid competing with them in the marketplace. But the first order of business in any antitrust trial is defining the market that is allegedly being illegally monopolized, which turned out to be the central failure of the FTC’s case.
The agency’s amended claim defined the “personal social networking” market in question as consisting of only Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. That narrow definition produced high market shares for the Meta platforms, like the kind often associated with monopoly power.
But in Boasberg’s decision, he noted today’s obvious competitive pressure from platforms left out of that definition, including TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn. The broader, and as Boasberg asserted, more accurate, definition of the market meant the FTC failed to show Meta maintained an unlawful monopoly in social media.
“Like Heraclitus’s river, the rapids of social media rush along so fast that the Court has never even stepped into the same case twice,” Boasberg wrote in his decision. “The Court’s two Opinions on motions to dismiss did not even mention the word ‘TikTok.’ Today, that app holds center stage as Meta’s fiercest rival.”
Joseph Coniglio of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation said in an interview, “This was a real shellacking for the FTC, as there really wasn’t one major issue of fact or law where the court didn’t agree with Meta.”
“And by finding that Facebook has no monopoly power, the judge didn’t even have to address whether the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp were illegal,” he added.
FTC spokesman Joe Simonson told NPR that the agency was “deeply disappointed” by the decision. In what some have interpreted as a questioning of Boasberg’s impartiality, Simonson also said, “the deck was always stacked against us with Judge Boasberg.” Trump, in reference to deportation cases in which Boasberg has recently ruled against the administration, called the judge a “Radical Left Lunatic” on social media.
The FTC was seeking to force Meta to unwind the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp by urging the company to sell them off. Breakup is considered one of the most severe antitrust remedies. A similar remedy was also rejected earlier this year in the Department of Justice’s successful case against Google, in which the government sought to force the company to sell off its popular Chrome browser product.
The Meta loss is the latest chapter in a five-year-long bipartisan effort to rein in Big Tech in the courts. After new antitrust measures aimed at large tech platforms failed to pass in Congress in 2022, the effort moved to the relevant executive agencies and into the courts.
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The first Trump administration began the trend and reflected the political Right’s frustration with the industry over what many Republicans believe was unfair treatment of conservative viewpoints online that may have affected elections. During former President Joe Biden’s administration, the political Left gladly took up the cause by filing additional cases against tech companies, but for different reasons. Hostility toward the industry from the Left was rooted more in concerns around the size of the biggest tech companies and general support for stricter regulation of the business community.
Next up in the government’s litigation campaign against Big Tech is the FTC’s antitrust suit against Amazon, which began during the Biden administration. Unless the case is settled beforehand, that trial will likely not begin until 2027.
Jessica Melugin is the director of the Center for Technology and Innovation at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and a 2025 Innovators Network Foundation antitrust and competition policy fellow.
