In This Article:
This story was originally published on Social Media Today. To receive daily news and insights, subscribe to our free daily Social Media Today newsletter.
It seems that Zuckerberg’s realignment with the Trump Administration hasn’t paid off in the first key test of that relationship.
This week, Meta will head to court to defend itself against the FTC’s bid to force the divestiture of both Instagram and WhatsApp, over what the FTC argues is anti-competitive behavior from Zuckerberg’s social behemoth.
The case has gone back and forth for years.
Back in 2020, the FTC launched legal action against Meta, which alleged that the company had illegally maintained its social networking monopoly “through a years-long course of anticompetitive conduct”.
The suit specifically focused on Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, claiming that Meta had acquired both to “neutralize competition,” in violation of antitrust law, and called for the divestment of the two apps in response.
In 2021, however, the FTC’s suit was rejected by a federal judge, citing failure to “plausibly establish” Facebook’s monopoly power. The FTC then re-launched an amended case along the same lines, which was approved to go to trial a year later.
The legal wrangling over the case has been going on ever since, with Meta seeking to have the case dismissed entirely last year, by arguing that it doesn’t have a monopoly on the digital ads market, citing ongoing competition from X, YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat, among others.
That clearly wasn’t a convincing enough case, and now, Meta will have to present its arguments in court, with its broader business empire at risk if it loses the case.
Which Meta has once again dismissed as meritless:
“The FTC’s case ignores how the market actually works and chases a theory that doesn’t hold up in the real world. Instagram and WhatsApp provide a model for what successful acquisitions can achieve: Meta has made Instagram and WhatsApp better, more reliable and more secure through billions of dollars and millions of hours of investment.”
Indeed, according to Meta, the FTC’s case fails to establish the company’s alleged dominance:
“In order for the FTC to win this case, they need to prove both that Meta has a dominant share in a properly defined product market that includes all competitors, and that the two acquisitions harmed competition and consumers. They are wrong on both claims. That’s why they’ve gerrymandered a fictitious market in which Facebook and Instagram compete only with Snapchat and an app called MeWe. In reality, more time is spent on TikTok and YouTube than on either Facebook or Instagram – if you only add TikTok and YouTube into the FTC’s social media market definition, Meta has <30% market share.”