Meta wins major US antitrust case

Judge: Tech giant did not stifle competitors

- CECILIA KANG

Meta did not break the law when it bought its nascent rivals Instagram and WhatsApp, a federal judge said Tuesday, handing a major win to the $1.51 trillion company and dealing a blow to the government's efforts to rein in the power of tech giants.

Judge James Boasberg of the US District Court of the District of Columbia said in an 89-page ruling that Meta did not create a monopoly in social networking through the acquisitions. The Federal Trade Commission had sued Meta, accusing it of breaking antitrust law by acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp in a “buy or bury” strategy to cement its social networking dominance.

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,” Mr Boasberg said, adding that the agency needed to prove that argument. “The court's verdict today determines that the FTC has not done so.”

The decision is a reprieve for Meta, which has defined the social media landscape since Mark Zuckerberg co-founded Facebook in his Harvard University dorm room in 2004. The FTC had preemptively asked the judge to force Meta to divest itself of Instagram and WhatsApp.

The win clears the way for Meta to continue to pursue its business ambitions, including its expansion into artificial intelligence.

But the ruling is a setback for federal regulators, who have sought to curb tech companies’ power in the modern internet age through a series of antitrust lawsuits. The lawsuits began at the end of the first Trump administration and continued through Joe Biden's administration, with President Donald Trump not backing off the cases in his second term.