A US district judge on Tuesday ruled against the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in its antitrust lawsuit against social media giant Meta (META).
In his ruling, Judge James Boasberg said the FTC failed to prove that Meta purchased Instagram and WhatsApp with the goal of eliminating them as competitors in the social media market.
The FTC was seeking to force Meta to divest itself of both Instagram and WhatsApp, despite the commission originally approving their purchases in 2012 and 2014, respectively.
Boasberg said government lawyers insufficiently argued that Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat make up what they referred to as a personal social networking market. Instead, the judge found Meta’s argument that if there was a private social networking market, it doesn’t exist anymore, and that the company also has to compete with major rivals such as TikTok and Google’s (GOOG, GOOGL) YouTube.
“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 in his ruling.
“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,” Boasberg added.
The FTC’s case could have been devastating for Meta. The company would have lost one of its most important moneymakers in Instagram, which has helped it better compete with TikTok, while also having to divorce itself from one of the world’s leading messaging apps in WhatsApp.
The Trump administration initially sued Meta in 2020, and the Biden administration continued the matter.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg and President Trump had an acrimonious relationship after the CEO suspended Trump’s account following the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. Trump subsequently threatened to jail Zuckerberg.
But Zuckerberg has had several face-to-face interactions since President Trump took office for the second time. Meta has also donated to Trump’s inauguration fund, as well as to the construction of the White House’s new East Wing.
Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on Twitter at @DanielHowley.
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