Overview
- The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed the FTC’s 2020 suit seeking to unwind Meta’s purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp.
- Chief Judge James Boasberg rejected a narrow 'personal social networking' market, concluding Meta competes across social media with TikTok and YouTube.
- The opinion relied on empirical 'natural experiments' such as Meta’s 2021 outage and TikTok’s India ban to show users substitute across platforms.
- The court found the FTC failed to prove current monopoly power, ending the case without reaching the acquisitions’ competitive effects.
- Legal analysts say the ruling highlights the difficulty of applying traditional antitrust to fast‑evolving, AI‑driven markets, spurring debate over alternative policy tools.