Meta’s Landmark Antitrust Trial Opens With Focus on 2020 Election

The Federal Trade Commission began laying out its landmark antitrust case against Meta Platforms in federal district court in Washington Monday (April 14), with FTC attorney Daniel Matheson telling the judge Meta “decided that competition was too hard and it would be easier to buy out their rivals than to compete with them,” according to reports from inside the courtroom.

“For more than 100 years, American public policy has insisted firms must compete if they want to succeed,” Matheson said in his opening statement. “The reason we are here is that Meta broke the deal.”

The FTC is seeking to force Meta to unwind its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, which the commission originally had approved in 2012 and 2014, respectively. In a blog post Sunday, Meta called the case “weak” and accused the agency of engaging in “an unprecedented exercise in revisionist history,” that “sends the message that no deal is ever final, and that businesses operating in America will be punished for innovating.”

In an appearance on Fox Business Monday morning, FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson pushed back on that criticism, saying the antitrust watchdog is obligated to monitor changing market conditions.

“The FTC doesn’t clear transactions, it tries to make predictions about whether a transaction will be anticompetitive,” he told host Maria Bartiromo. “Here we have actual evidence that the transactions turned out to be anticompetitive.”

Despite Meta’s emphasis on the decade that passed since the deals were approved, Ferguson focused his comments on 2020, when the case was originally brought. The FTC began investigating Meta prior to the 2020 election and filed the lawsuit in December of that year, in the final weeks of the first Donald Trump administration. At the time, Trump and his supporters were disputing his loss to Joe Biden, and Meta, then Facebook, was among the social media platforms the outgoing president accused of suppressing conservative voices and manipulating the election.

The acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp gave Meta “a tremendous amount of power,” Ferguson said. “We’re addressing the power of Meta and making sure the situation we had in 2020 will never again arise.”

Facebook officials have lobbied the FTC and other centers of power in Washington intensively to try to settle the case before trial or get it dismissed altogether.

According to a report Monday in Semafor, however, Ferguson, along with Justice Department Antitrust Division head Gail Slater and former aide to Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) Mike Davis, whether with the president in the Oval Office last week to “stiffen Trump’s spine against a relentless wave of lobbying from Meta.”

Zuckerberg is expected to be among the first witnesses called in the trial and could take the stand as early as Monday afternoon. Also scheduled to testify are former Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg and Instagram Co-founder Kevin Systrom.

“We certainly think [Meta’s] a monopoly, Ferguson said. “We’re making sure that 2020 can never happen again.”