Meta scored a major victory last month when a federal judge ruled that its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp do not violate U.S. antitrust laws, a significant setback for the Federal Trade Commission and its former chairwoman, Lina Khan. By my count, that brings her misguided antitrust agenda’s record to 0-5, which isn’t surprising given her lack of a solid legal foundation.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg dismissed the FTC’s claim that Meta illegally monopolized “personal social networking services,” writing that the agency failed to show the company holds monopoly power today. “With apps surging and receding … the FTC has understandably struggled to fix the boundaries of Meta’s product market,” he wrote. Regardless of Meta’s past position, he said, the FTC did not prove it still dominates the market now.
Being an actual monopoly is supposed to be the first requirement for an antitrust lawsuit against a business. However, the Biden administration, Khan, and even some nationalists on the Right have recently set that standard aside, instead using antitrust as a weapon to harm and control businesses and industries they do not like. In this case, it was Big Tech.
The ruling followed a seven-week trial featuring testimony from Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, former Meta COO Sheryl Sandberg, and executives across the tech sector. The FTC argued that Meta bought Instagram and WhatsApp to neutralize emerging competitive threats. Meta countered that the competition it faces is broader, including short-form video, private messaging, and commerce. Witnesses representing TikTok, Reddit, Pinterest, and X testified they all compete directly with Meta for time, attention, and ad dollars. It’s telling when even competitors are calling foul.
The lawsuit has long been associated with Khan, a favorite among far-left progressives who oppose successful businesses and a surprisingly large number of “Khanservative” Republicans who support her weaponized antitrust objectives. The case was also significantly influenced by Justice Department antitrust chief Gail Slater, whose background, like Khan’s, is rooted in European-style competition law.
Europe has long set economic standards that hinder growth. That’s why its citizens are poorer than people living in Mississippi, and its tech sector is barren. You won’t see any innovations emerging from the concrete it laid over its markets years ago, and the U.S. economy has gained from that. The builders and doers open shop here instead, and the results support the entire U.S. stock market and the economy as a whole. But if Khan and her pro-regulatory allies on both sides get their way, the U.S. regulatory system will look like the European Union’s.
Notably, before trial, Meta had reportedly floated a settlement worth roughly half a billion dollars. That is another common tactic by government entities facing off against large corporations. It’s almost a shakedown effort, but it would have been easy money that could have saved taxpayers money. The FTC rejected it under pressure from Khan’s ideological allies, a gamble that now leaves taxpayers with nothing.
This defeat does not end the FTC’s losing streak in court. The agency is still pursuing its lawsuit against Amazon, claiming the company has made canceling Prime “too hard,” even though consumers consistently rank it as one of the best-value services in the country, and Amazon is doing more to help consumers deal with inflation than other retailers. The common thread in the Khan playbook is using antitrust tactics to threaten and pressure America’s most well-liked, utilized, and successful businesses.
The consumer welfare standard developed by actual conservatives and American legal minds in the 1980s (at a time when the Right was still focused on conserving what was worth saving, such as a free market) was a perfect legal framework. If a company is a monopoly and is truly using that power to harm consumers, then it is valid for the government to step in. But when those conditions are not met, antitrust action is merely a way for government thugs to control the market and steal from American innovators. Those conditions will drive down innovation and output. After all, why take on the risk of building anything when it can be stripped away unfairly?
JUDGE RULES META DID NOT CREATE MONOPOLY WITH PURCHASES OF INSTAGRAM AND WHATSAPP
The American economy is in dire need of innovators, job creators, and industry investments. This is not news to a vast swath of the administration’s backers. There’s a reason Silicon Valley pioneers rallied to the GOP ticket in 2024, and it wasn’t the prospect of the administration pursuing Khan and Slater’s failed approach, which prioritizes combating “bigness” as a goal in and of itself rather than combating actual consumer rip-offs.
At a time when Americans are frustrated by rising prices, the agency’s continued focus on untested legal frameworks, rather than provable consumer harm, is increasingly hard to square with reality. The Meta ruling underscores a pattern: The FTC is swinging for the fences, missing badly, and burning resources in the process. The current administration would be wise to walk away from this approach while it still can.
Hannah Cox (@HannahDCox) is the president and cofounder of BASEDPolitics and a fellow for the White Coat Waste Project.
