Meta wins in antitrust court with judge denying monopoly

After five years, Meta has won a lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) over its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.

In an opinion released Tuesday, U.S. District Judge James Boasberg said the FTC did not prove that Meta violated antitrust laws when it acquired Instagram for $1 billion in 2012 and WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014.

The FTC successfully uncovered evidence that Meta (then called Facebook) was concerned about Instagram’s rapid growth and the competition it could cause.

“One way to look at this is that what we’re really buying is time,” Mark Zuckerberg wrote in February 2012, according to internal Facebook emails revealed during the trial. “Even if a new competitor emerges, if we buy Instagram, Path, Foursquare, etc. now, it will take more than a year to consolidate their dynamics before anyone can approach their scale again.”

However, Judge Boasberg ruled not on whether Meta was acting as a monopoly at the time, but on whether it is now a monopoly. Boasberg pointed to apps like TikTok as evidence that there is competition in the meta.

“The situation that existed just five years ago when the Federal Trade Commission brought this antitrust case has changed significantly,” Boasberg said in a memorandum opinion. “While it may have once made sense to separate apps into separate markets for social networking and social media, those walls have since come down.”