Credit: Lance Grandahl via Unsplash
A judge in the US has ruled that Meta doesn’t operate a monopoly on social media.
Regulator the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) had accused the owner of Facebook of breaking antitrust law when it purchased Instagram and WhatsApp.
“Meta holds no monopoly in the relevant market,” Judge James Boasberg said in his opinion, which ended nearly six years of legal action.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had spent more than 10 hours giving testimony during the trial earlier this year.
The judge pointed to the fast changing market in social media.
“Believing that the only constant in the world was change, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus posited that no man can ever step into the same river twice,” the judge wrote.
“In the online world of social media, the current runs fast, too. The landscape that existed only five years ago when the Federal Trade Commission brought this antitrust suit has changed markedly.
“While it once might have made sense to partition apps into separate markets of social networking and social media, that wall has since broken down.”
The FTC had argued the company was illegally maintaining its personal social networking monopoly through a years-long course of anticompetitive conduct.
The complaint alleged that 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.
Meta said the court’s decision recognises that Meta faces fierce competition.
The court described the mighty Meta of today as once being a scrappy dorm-room startup called The Facebook.
“This upstart website — a threadbare tool to add friends and see their posts — launched for Harvard students in 2004, fanned out to other college campuses, and then opened up to the general public in 2006," the judge said.
“It kept growing at a dizzying pace: by the end of 2011, almost 850 million people a month were using Facebook. Today, more than 3 billion people do.”
And today two other social-media apps are relevant, TikTok and YouTube, the court said.
“Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube have … evolved to have nearly identical main features,” the judge said.
“As Meta has moved to showing TikTok-style videos, TikTok has moved to adding Meta-style features to share them with friends.
“TikTok encourages users to add their friends, including by importing their list of Facebook and Instagram friends and phone contacts, and uses those lists to recommend accounts for users to follow.”
The judge said the FTC had struggled to fix the boundaries of Meta’s product market, with apps surging and receding, chasing one craze and moving on from others, and adding new features with each passing year.
“Even so it continues to insist that Meta competes with the same old rivals it has for the last decade, that the company holds a monopoly among that small set, and that it maintained that monopoly through anticompetitive acquisitions.
“Whether or not Meta enjoyed monopoly power in the past, though, the agency must show that it continues to hold such power now. The court’s verdict today determines that the FTC has not done so.”
The next big antitrust case is over Google’s dominance in advertising markets.
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