Antitrust Trial Sees FTC and Meta Debate Whether Company Has Competitors

The antitrust trial brought against Meta by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has reportedly focused on what the company’s platforms do and who they compete with.

These determinations are important because the antitrust case depends on proving that Meta’s products have a monopoly in what the FTC calls “personal social networking services,” Bloomberg reported Tuesday (April 29).

Meta aims to counter this claim by arguing that it competes in a variety of areas and against a wide range of rivals, according to the report.

At stake is the FTC’s effort to break up Meta, with the company’s Instagram and WhatsApp platforms being spun off, per the report.

This has been the focus of the trial over the past week, the report said.

So far in the trial, the FTC has focused on differences between Meta’s products and other companies’ platforms, saying that some platforms allow users to sign up anonymously and used pseudonyms, while Meta’s Facebook has rules against that; some platforms show content that matches a user’s interests, while Facebook and Instagram have historically centered on users’ friends and family; and other platforms’ marketing materials have focused on the differences between them and Meta’s platforms, according to the report.

Meta has argued during the trial that its products have evolved, that the percentage of posts seen by users that are tied to friends and family has been declining for years, and that other social media platforms offer features that enable users to connect with friends, per the report.

The trial is expected to continue at least until June, the report said.

The FTC initially filed its antitrust lawsuit against Meta in 2020, during the first Trump Administration.

Some of the FTC’s claims were dismissed in November, but the agency’s core arguments involving Instagram and WhatsApp were allowed to proceed to trial.

At that time, a Meta spokesperson said the company was “confident that the evidence at trial will show that the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp have been good for competition and consumers.”

An FTC spokesperson said the FTC filed the case under the Trump Administration and continued it under the Biden Administration, adding that the case “represents a bipartisan effort to curtail Meta’s monopoly power and restore competition to ensure freedom and innovation in the social media ecosystem.”