Report from New York Times
In Brief – Federal Judge James Boasberg has ruled that Meta did not violate federal antitrust law when it acquired Instagram and WhatsApp, delivering a major victory to the social media giant. In an 89-page decision, Judge Boasberg held that the Federal Trade Commission failed to prove Meta maintained an unlawful monopoly in social networking. The government had said it wanted to force Meta to sell off the two platforms. Boasberg said that the FTC “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.” Boasberg criticized that as an outdated view of Meta’s current competitive landscape.
Context – Defining the market is key in all antitrust litigation, and Boasberg saw it as the Achilles Heel of the government throughout this long case. Back in 2021, he dismissed the original FTC complaint. Although he eventually let the agency’s amended effort proceed, he continued to express skepticism with the FTC’s argument that Meta was the dominant “personal social networking” company whose top competitor was Snapchat, excluding competition from social media giants like TikTok, YouTube, Reddit and LinkedIn. TikTok, with its massive and disruptive growth since the case was filed in 2020, which led Meta to transform Facebook and Instagram to operate more like the Chinese short video phenom in recent years, was called “Meta’s fiercest rival” by the judge. This is the second major antitrust decision in recent months in which the federal government’s effort to break up a tech giant was rejected by a federal judge focused on changes in the digital marketplace. In September, District Judge Amit Mehta crafted remedies in the Google Search antitrust case that he said were based on “a healthy dose of humility” in light of the rapid rise in AI chatbots, which had emerged a couple of years after the case was filed in 2020 and now appears to be developing into a robust competitor to Google’s traditional internet search service.