Meta wins antitrust trial as judge denies it is a monopoly

Five years later, Meta emerged victorious from a lawsuit brought by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.

In an opinion issued Tuesday, U.S. District Judge James Bosberg wrote that the FTC had not proven that Meta was violating antitrust law when it bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012 and WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014.

The FTC was able to turn up evidence showing that Meta — then called Facebook — was concerned about Instagram’s rapid growth and the competition it could pose.

“One way to look at this is that what we’re really buying is time,” Mark Zuckerberg wrote in February 2012, in internal Facebook emails that emerged during the trial. “Even if some new competitors appear [sic] Buying Instagram, Path, Foursquare, etc. will now give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get anywhere near their scale again.

But Judge Boasberg did not rule on whether Meta had operated as a monopoly at the time, but rather whether it was a current monopoly. Boasberg pointed to apps like TikTok as evidence that Meta has competition.

“The landscape that existed just five years ago, when the FTC filed this antitrust suit, has changed significantly,” Boasberg wrote in his opinion. “While it may have previously made sense to segment apps into separate social networking and social media markets, that wall has since come down.”