Meta’s Antitrust test starts on Monday. This is what is at stake – National

Meta Platforms Inc. is confronted with a historical antitrust test that starts with Monday who could force the tech giant to break down Instagram And WhatsAppStartups that bought it more than a decade ago, which have since grown into social media power patients.

The threatening antitrust process will be the first major test of the assets of the Federal Trade Commission of President Donald Trump to challenge Big Tech. The lawsuit was brought against Meta – then called Facebook – in 2020, during Trump’s first term. It claims that the company has bought Instagram and WhatsApp to crush the competition and to establish an illegal monopoly on the social media market.

Meta, the FTC argues, has maintained a monopoly by pursuing the strategy of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “expressed in 2008:” It’s better to buy than compete. ” True to that rule, Facebook systematically followed potential rivals and took over companies that considered serious competing threats. “

Facebook has also established policy that has been designed to make it difficult for smaller rivals to enter the market and “neutralize observed competing threats,” the FTC says in its complaint, just when the world moved its attention to mobile devices of desktop computers.

“Not able to maintain his monopoly by reasonably competing, the managers of the company have tackled the existential threat by buying new innovators that succeeds where Facebook failed,” says the FTC.

Facebook bought Instagram-tok a filthy app for sharing photos without advertisements and a small cult supporter-in 2012. The purchase price of US $ 1 billion and shares was striking at that time, although the value of the deal fell to $ 750 million after the share price of Facebook after its first public offer in May 2012.

Instagram was the first company that bought Facebook and remained active as a separate app. Until that time, Facebook was known for smaller “Acqui-hires”-a kind of popular Silicon Valley deal in which a company buys a startup as a way to hire its talented employees and then close the acquired company. Two years later it did it again with the Messaging App WhatsApp, who bought it for $ 22 billion.

WhatsApp and Instagram helped Facebook to move its company from desktop computers to mobile devices, and to stay popular with younger generations such as Rivals such as Snapchat (who also tried, but failed to buy) and Tiktok was created. However, the FTC has a limited definition of Meta’s competing market, with the exception of companies such as Tiktok, YouTube and Apple’s Message Service from ALS rivals to Instagram and WhatsApp.

“The FTC already has the difficult task, whether it looks at 10 years ago or five years ago or today, to try to define what we are talking about in a sufficient scary way that it can show that Meta has a lot of power in that market,” said Paul Swanson, an antitrogen vocate for the Holland & Hart law firm. “And I think that challenge has become more difficult as the years are over and we see more and more potential competitors in social media rooms.”

Meta now says the lawsuit of the FTC ‘Tart de Reality’.

“The evidence at trial will show what every 17-year-old in the world knows: Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp compete with Chinese-owned TikTok, YouTube, X, iMessage and many others. More than 10 years after the FTC reviewed and cleared our acquisitions, the Commission’s action in this case sends The Message That No Deal is Ever Trual Final.

In a submission last week, Meta also emphasized that the FTC must “prove that Meta has monopolistic power in its claimed relevant market now, at a certain moment in the past.” This, experts say, can also be a challenge, because more competitors have emerged in social media in the years since the company Bought WhatsApp and Instagram.

Trending now

• NS Missing Kids: Search to resume in the Schoorgebied 2 weeks after the disappearance

• Pregnant, brain-dead Georgia-wife kept alive because of the state’s abortion ban

Meta’s fate will be determined by the American district judge James Boasberg, who refused a brief judgment at the end of last year and ruled that the case should go to court.

Boasberg “seems to be skeptical” about the limited market definition of the FTC in its statements so far, Swanson said. He added that the judge also said that it is a ‘fact question’, which means that he is open to hear what the FTC and its experts have to say to define that narrow market.

Although the FTC can be confronted with a tough struggle to prove the case, the deployment is high for Meta, whose advertising company can be cut in two when it is forced to turn off Instagram.

“Instagram is now the biggest money maker in the US in the US, the most lucrative market, where the app is good for 50.5 percent of the company’s advertisement in 2025. Instagram has also collected the play for Facebook on the user front, especially among young people,” said Emarketer Analyst Jasmine enberg. “The test also comes as Meta tries to reduce OG Facebook in an attempt to appeal to Gen Z and younger users as they become a member of social media. Social media use is much more fragmented today when Facebook has taken over Instagram, and Facebook is no longer where the cool university children need more advertisements. meta budgets. “

But Meta is not the only technology company in the sights of federal antitreulent brewers; Google and Amazon are confronted with their own cases. The remedy -phase of Google’s case is planned to start on April 21. A federal court declared the search giant an illegal monopoly last August.

“A big theme here is that we apply 19th-century laws to the 21st-century markets. And I think it is an open question whether the assessments of the opinion of the antitrust legislation can keep track of the markets while they change this liquid and dynamic technical markets in particular,” Swanson said. “And this will be a matter that speaks directly on it.”

& copy 2025 The Canadian Press