After five years, Meta has emerged victorious from a United States Federal Trade Commission lawsuit over its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.
In an opinion released on Tuesday, United States District Court Judge James Boasberg wrote that the Federal Trade Commission did not prove that Meta was violating antitrust law when it bought Instagram for one billion dollars in 2012 and WhatsApp for nineteen billion dollars in 2014.
The Federal Trade Commission did manage to surface evidence showing that Meta, then called Facebook, was concerned about Instagram’s fast growth and the competition it could pose. Internal Facebook emails that surfaced during the trial revealed a message from Mark Zuckerberg in February 2012. He wrote that one way of looking at the acquisition was that the company was really buying time. He noted that even if new competitors sprang up, purchasing Instagram and other apps would give them a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone could get close to their scale again.
However, Judge Boasberg was not ruling on whether Meta had acted as a monopoly in the past, but rather on if it is currently a monopoly. Boasberg pointed to apps like TikTok as evidence that Meta faces significant competition.
The judge wrote that the landscape that existed just five years ago, when the Federal Trade Commission brought this antitrust suit, has changed markedly. He stated that while it once might have made sense to partition apps into separate markets of social networking and social media, that wall has since broken down.