FTC Rests at Meta Monopoly Trial, Shifting Focus to Defense (3)

The Federal Trade Commission wrapped up its case Thursday for breaking up Meta Platforms Inc. as an illegal social-media monopoly, with the company now set to lay out its defense in the ongoing antitrust trial.

Meta will take the next several weeks to present evidence and testimony before US District Judge James Boasberg in Washington. The company also filed a long-shot request for the judge to end the trial in its favor, arguing the government failed to prove its claims.

Meta “acquired Instagram and WhatsApp in order to improve them and expand its own portfolio of services — to better compete against many dynamic, innovative, and fierce rivals,” the company said in
the filing.

The trial has so far featured high-profile testimony from Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg and former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg, among other witnesses.

The FTC, which wants Meta to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp, claims the company has a monopoly in the market for “personal social networking services,” consisting of products focused on sharing things online with friends and family.

A spokesperson for the federal agency said that the evidence presented over the last five weeks has demonstrated that Meta maintained a monopoly by purchasing its most threatening rivals so it wouldn’t have to compete with them. The FTC has presented more than 100 internal Meta documents to build its case. It argues that this evidence has demonstrated that Meta has degraded of the quality of its products, including through weaker privacy protections and an increased volume of ads, while bringing Meta billions in profits.

Meta, meanwhile, argues that the FTC’s market definition is much too narrow and excludes competitors like ByteDance Ltd.’s TikTok, Google’s YouTube and Apple Inc.’s iMessage.

The FTC doesn’t dispute that Meta competes with those companies in markets such as messaging and video, but it claims that, in the core market of communicating with friends and family, the company’s only real competitor is Snap Inc.’s Snapchat.

Meta counters that social media has changed in recent years and people use a variety of digital means to communicate, including messaging and sharing videos. And Meta has argued throughout the first five weeks of trial that the government has been unable to prove any harm to its users.

“After five weeks of trial, it is clear that the FTC has failed to meet the legal standard required under antitrust law,” Meta spokesman Christopher Sgro said in a statement. “Regardless, we will present our case to show what every 17-year-old in the world knows: Instagram competes with TikTok (and YouTube and X and many other apps).”

The company began its defense by calling Snap employees, including its chief information officer, Saral Jain, whose testimony is largely sealed.

(Updates with FTC statement throughout, starting in the sixth paragraph)

--With assistance from Riley Griffin.

To contact the reporter on this story:
Josh Sisco in San Francisco at jsisco6@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Sara Forden at sforden@bloomberg.net

Anthony Lin, Peter Blumberg

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