Meta Platforms Inc. Facing a historic antitrust test from Monday which could force the technology giant to break Instagram And WhatsappThe startups he bought more than a decade that has since grown in social media powers.
The imminent antitrust trial will be the first major test for the capacity of the Federal Trade Commission of President Donald Trump to challenge Big Tech. The trial was filed against Meta – then called Facebook – in 2020, during Trump’s first term. He says that the company bought Instagram and WhatsApp to crush competition and establish an illegal monopoly on the social media market.
Meta, supports the FTC, maintained a monopoly by continuing the strategy of the CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “expressed in 2008:” It is better to buy only to compete “. True to this maxim, Facebook systematically followed potential competitors and acquired from companies which she considered serious competitive threats. »»
Facebook has also promulgated policies designed to make it difficult for small rivals to enter the market and “neutralize perceived competitive threats”, says the FTC in its complaint, just as the world has paid its attention to mobile devices from office computers.
“Unable to maintain his monopoly by passing enough, business managers addressed the existential threat by buying new innovators who succeeded when Facebook failed,” said the FTC.
Facebook bought Instagram – then an application for sharing photos dismissed without advertisements and a small cult after – in 2012. The purchase price in cash and shares at $ 1 billion was in the process of leaving the eyes at the time, although the value of the agreement fell to $ 750 million after the drop in the price of Facebook’s action after its first public offer in May 2012.
Instagram was the first company that Facebook bought and continued to execute as a separate application. Until then, Facebook was known for its smaller “acqui-hires”-a type of popular Silicon Valley transaction in which a company buys a startup as a means of hiring its talented workers, then closed the acquired business. Two years later, he did it again with the WhatsApp messaging application, which he bought for $ 22 billion.
WhatsApp and Instagram helped Facebook move its activities, from office computers to mobile devices, and to stay popular with young generations while competitors like Snapchat (which he also tried, but failed, to buy) and Tiktok emerged. However, the FTC has a close definition of the Meta competitive market, excluding companies like Tiktok, YouTube and Apple’s messaging service to be considered as Rivals in Instagram and Whatsapp.
“The FTC already has a difficult task, which it looks at 10 years ago or five years ago or today, to try to define what is the market which we are talking about in a sufficiently narrow manner to show that META has a ton of power on this market,” said Paul Swanson, a antitrust lawyer for the law firm Hutland & Hart. “And I think this challenge has become more difficult over the years and we see more and more potential competitors in social media spaces.”
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Meta, on the other hand, says that the FTC trial “defies reality”.
“The evidence during the trial shows what each young person in the world knows: Instagram, Facebook and Whatsapp compete with Tiktok, YouTube, Imessage belonging to the Chinese. More than 10 years after the FTC examined and erased our acquisitions, the action of the commission in this case sends the message that no matter is really final. Critical questions like AI, “the company said in a statement.
In a file last week, Meta also stressed that the FTC “must prove that Meta has a monopoly power in its relevant market claimed now, not at some point in the past”. According to experts, this could also be difficult because more competitors have emerged in social media space in the years that followed the purchase of WhatsApp and Instagram.
Meta’s fate will be decided by the American district judge James Boasberg, who denied Meta’s request for a summary judgment of Meta and judged that the case should be tried.
Boasberg “seems skeptical” of the FTC’s close market definition in its decisions to date, Swanson said. He added that the judge also said that it was a “fact of fact”, which means that it is open to hearing what the FTC and its experts must say to define this narrow market.
While the FTC can face a difficult battle to prove its case, the issues are raised for Meta, whose advertising affairs could be reduced in two if it is forced to turn Instagram.
“Instagram is now Meta’s largest money manufacturer in the United States, its most lucrative market, where the application represents 50.5% of the company’s advertising revenues in 2025. Instagram has also taken over for Facebook on the user’s front, especially among young people,” said Jasmine Enberg. “The trial also intervenes while Meta tries to bring Og Facebook back in order to use users of the Z generation and young people when they join social media. The use of social media is much more fragmented today than in 2012, when Facebook has acquired Instagram, and that Facebook is not where cool college students drag with their metas-meta need Instagram to continue to grow, because more advertisements Instagram-tirst with their Meta budgets. “
But Meta is not the only technological company at the idea of federal antitrust, Google and Amazon regulators are faced with their own cases. The remedy phase of the Google case is expected to start on April 21. A federal judge said that the research giant an illegal monopoly last August.
“A great theme here is that we apply the laws of the 19th century to the 21st century markets. And I think that it is an open question if the developments of judgment to the antitrust law can follow the markets as they change – these fluid and dynamic technological markets in particular,” said Swanson. “And this will be a case that talks about it directly.”
& Copy 2025 the Canadian press