“The government will want us to imagine—if even implicitly—that this is 2018 and Facebook and Instagram are the two big players,” Albrecht said. “But they aren’t anymore.”
And considering that both transactions were completed long ago, the burden of proof will be higher for the FTC than in some other antitrust cases, Albrecht said. Ultimately, he predicts that the FTC will be hard-pressed to convince a judge that the divestiture of Instagram and possibly of WhatsApp will meaningfully impact future competition in the market, because today “there are more competitors and options than ever.”
If the FTC prevails, Meta could be forced to spin off Instagram or WhatsApp. Softer potential penalties could entail the divestiture of specific assets or changes to Meta’s data practices in lieu of a larger breakup.
Billions of ad dollars are at stake
Should the FTC succeed in making its case, Meta stands to lose critical ad money and market share. Instagram in particular represents a critical piece of the company’s revenue generation—in 2025, Instagram is expected to contribute to more than half of Meta’s total U.S. ad revenue, bringing in more than $32 billion, according to recent data from eMarketer.
In short: A breakup of the business would be ruinous for Meta’s revenues.
“Meta is nearly 100% dependent on advertising revenue, so its real concern is anything that restricts it from offering advertisers a single buying platform [that leverages] all of Meta’s data signals collected across the web and its nearly ubiquitous services,” said Jason Kint, CEO of Digital Content Next, a digital media trade body.
For advertisers, a breakup of Meta’s business would likely weaken the ability to use Meta as a kind of one-stop shop for media buying across some of the most trafficked parts of the web. It would force brands to reevaluate their digital marketing investment strategies at large, experts told ADWEEK.
A pre-trial settlement is possible but unlikely
Zuckerberg has reportedly visited Trump at the White House three times since the start of the President’s second term in January.
The tech exec is attempting to settle the case ahead of the trial’s scheduled start date, according to reports from The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Politico.
“Meta’s maneuvers highlight that there’s an intricate dance between corporate power and political influence in the current tech landscape and political environment,” said Matt Navarra, a social media consultant and industry analyst.
And while tech’s biggest hitters—including Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos and Google’s Sundar Pichai—have attempted to woo Trump in these early days of his administration (not to mention the omnipresence of Trump’s right-hand man Elon Musk), the President has not smiled entirely favorably upon them. Staggeringly high tariffs introduced by Trump last week are expected to hamstring tech supply chains globally and severely increase costs for hardware manufacturers as well as AI developers and semiconductor-reliant businesses.
The FTC’s antitrust case against Meta was itself brought during Trump’s first administration.
Now, with less than a week left before the trial’s slated start date, Zuckerberg is running out of time. Meanwhile, White House officials are growing increasingly frustrated with the company’s intensive lobbying tactics, the Wall Street Journal has reported.