The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has initiated a lawsuit against Meta Corporation on charges of creating an illegal monopoly in social networks by acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp. The US antitrust agency will try to prove the expediency of canceling these deals. Reuters reports.
The acquisitions were intended to eliminate competitors that could threaten Facebook's status as the dominant social media platform, according to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which filed the lawsuit in 2020 during President Donald Trump's first term.
Meta's Chief Legal Officer Jennifer Newsted called the case weak and a deterrent to investment in the technology in her blog.
"It’s absurd that the FTC is trying to break up a great American company at the same time the Administration is trying to save Chinese-owned TikTok," Newsted writes.
Meta has regularly reached out to Trump since his election, abandoning content moderation that Republicans see as censorship and donating $1 million to Trump's inauguration. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also made multiple visits to the White House in recent weeks.
Zuckerberg is expected to testify in court, where he will be questioned about emails in which he offered to buy Instagram to eliminate a potential competitor to Facebook, and expressed concerns that WhatsApp could evolve from an encrypted messaging service into a social network.
In court filings, Meta insists that its acquisitions of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 were beneficial to users. The company also argues that Zuckerberg's previous statements have lost relevance given today's fierce competition from TikTok (ByteDance), YouTube (Google), and Apple's iMessage messenger.
The Federal Trade Commission believes that Meta has a monopoly position in the market for platforms for communicating with friends and family. According to it, Meta's only major competitors in the United States are Snapchat and MeWe. In contrast, services such as X (Twitter), TikTok, YouTube and Reddit, which are focused on sharing content with strangers based on common interests, are not considered direct competitors of Meta.
The trial is scheduled for July 2025. If the FTC wins, in the second phase of the proceedings it will have to prove that forcing Meta to divest assets such as Instagram or WhatsApp will actually help restore competition in the market.