Zuck stuck on Trump’s bad side: FTC appeals loss in Meta monopoly case
Still feeling uneasy about Meta’s acquisition of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, the Federal Trade Commission will be appealing a November ruling that cleared Meta of allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly in a market dubbed “personal social networking.”
The FTC hopes the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia will agree that “robust evidence at trial” showed that Meta’s acquisitions were improper. In the initial trial, the FTC sought a breakup of Meta’s apps, with Meta risking forced divestments of Instagram or WhatsApp.
In a press release Tuesday, the FTC confirmed that it “continues to allege” that “for over a decade Meta has illegally maintained a monopoly in personal social networking services through anticompetitive conduct—by buying the significant competitive threats it identified in Instagram and WhatsApp.”
Related Knowledge Center: The Meta-FTC trial
The Federal Trade Commission charges that Meta monopolized social networking via Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. The trial concluded in May and now awaits a judge’s opinion in the U.S. District Court for D.C. The case is being closely watched as other antitrust lawsuits target Google and Apple.
Media and the law | Social media