Meta will face off against the U.S. Federal Trade Commission in an antitrust trial that will kick off on April 14. The case centers on allegations that the tech titan illegally stamped out competition through past acquisitions of early-stage startups including Instagram and WhatsApp.
It’s the most substantive challenge to how Meta handles competition against the company in its 21-year history. Should the FTC win the case, Meta could be forced to break up its $1.3 trillion ad business, potentially spinning off Instagram and WhatsApp.
Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg has been cozying up to President Trump in recent weeks in an apparent effort to shuffle the cards in his favor—and potentially reach a settlement that would exempt his company from a trial altogether. The 40-year-old executive was at The White House last Wednesday—his latest of a handful of visits, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. Whether the push will pan out in Meta’s favor remains to be seen.
Here are the most important details to know about Meta’s historic antitrust trial this month.
The trial will be a referendum on past decisions
The case takes a retrospective approach to assessing potentially anti-competitive behaviors in the market by seeking to litigate Meta’s past business decisions. Primarily, it centers on whether the 2012 acquisition of Instagram and the 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp were strategic moves to mitigate threats from competitors.
In its initial complaint, filed in 2020, the FTC alleged: “Facebook has engaged in a systematic strategy—including its 2012 acquisition of up-and-coming rival Instagram, its 2014 acquisition of the mobile messaging app WhatsApp, and the imposition of anticompetitive conditions on software developers—to eliminate threats to its monopoly.”
The complaint was made prior to the company’s renaming to Meta in 2021.
In its focus on decisions made by Meta in years past, “the FTC is saying, ‘This is not about you being a monopoly right now … but because you bought Instagram when you did and WhatsApp when you did, by virtue of that, you’ve stifled opportunity, and so therefore, at some point down the road, maybe you will be a monopoly,’” according to Bruce Weinberg, PhD, the head of the marketing department at University of Massachusetts, Amherst.
But it’s a potentially tenuous position for the agency to take because it focuses on a different time—and ultimately, a different market than today’s, said Brian Albrecht, an antitrust expert and the chief economist at the International Center for Law and Economics, a nonprofit policy research organization.