After five years, Meta has prevailed in a U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) lawsuit concerning its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.
U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg stated in an opinion released Tuesday that the FTC failed to demonstrate Meta violated antitrust law when it acquired Instagram for $1 billion in 2012 and WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014.
Evidence presented by the FTC showed that Meta, then Facebook, exhibited concerns regarding Instagram’s rapid growth and potential competitive threat. Mark Zuckerberg wrote in February 2012, according to internal Facebook emails, “One way of looking at this is that what we’re really buying is time. Even if some new competitors springs [sic] up, buying Instagram, Path, Foursquare, etc. now will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get close to their scale again.”
Judge Boasberg’s ruling did not address Meta’s past actions regarding monopoly status, but focused on its current market position. Boasberg cited applications like TikTok as proof of Meta’s existing competition. He noted in his memorandum opinion, “The landscape that existed only five years ago when the Federal Trade Commission brought this antitrust suit has changed markedly. 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.”
