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Nearly five years after it was first announced, the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust case against Meta is underway in a District of Columbia courtroom. Widely considered the weakest of the so-called “Big Tech” cases brought by the federal government, a rapidly changing tech landscape may make for an even steeper climb to victory by the FTC.
District Judge James Boasberg has reserved eight weeks to hear the case and then will decide if the company acted illegally to maintain a monopoly using anticompetitive tactics with its purchases of photo-sharing app Instagram and mobile message app WhatsApp. His verdict may not come for months, and if the government prevails, a remedy phase will follow. The FTC wants Meta to be forced to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp, which could significantly affect the parent company’s ad revenue, which is critical to its business model.
This seems eons ago in tech time, but the acquisitions at issue in the case go back even further. Meta, then still called Facebook, bought Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion, a price mocked for its extravagance on late-night shows at the time. In 2014, the tech giant acquired WhatsApp for $19 billion, marking the company’s largest purchase up until that time.
At trial, the FTC has focused attention on internal Meta communications that suggest that Instagram and WhatsApp were perceived as a threat to Facebook’s market leadership and that their acquisitions were aimed at preventing that competitive pressure.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and former Meta chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg pushed back on that narrative.
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