The FTC filed an antitrust case against Meta, challenging its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp on the grounds of “absolute market power through the elimination of competition.
Meta.
In Washington, a judge ruled Wednesday that Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms must go to trial on an FTC lawsuit seeking the breakup of the firm. FTC insists that Meta Platforms got Instagram and WhatsApp with the intent of eliminating rising competition in the social media market.
Judge James Boasberg has partially granted Meta’s request to dismiss an antitrust suit filed against Facebook back in 2020, during the Trump administration. The alleged that the company continued to act anti-competitively to keep its dominance in the social networking platform.
Today, as Meta, the FTC claims that when Facebook it overpaid in 2012 for Instagram and in 2014 for WhatsApp: not to shore up its business, but to knock out potential competition in the mobile ecosystem.
The judge allowed that claim to stay within the case. But he dismissed the FTC’s accusation that Facebook had limited third-party app developers’ access to its platform unless they agreed to forego their ability to compete with Facebook’s main services.
But he also rejected an argument advanced by Meta that it had improved its strategic position versus the likes of Apple and Google in acquiring WhatsApp. He said he would release a more comprehensive decision on the case later Thursday after the FTC and Meta have been permitted the opportunity to redact any commercially sensitive information.
A trial date has not yet been scheduled for the case.
Meta had also filed a motion to have the case dismissed entirely on grounds that it was founded on a far too narrow understanding of social media markets and paid no regard to competition from apps like ByteDance’s TikTok, Google’s YouTube, X, and Microsoft’s LinkedIn.
The case is one of five high-profile antitrust lawsuits in which regulators from the FTC and the U.S. Department of Justice are taking action against Big Tech. Amazon.com Inc. and Apple are both facing lawsuits, while Alphabet’s Google is dealing with two, including one in which a judge recently ruled that Google unlawfully hindered competition among online search engines.