The federal court decision in FTC v. Meta landed last month with all the weight of a shrug.
According to Judge James Boasberg, Meta did not break antitrust law when it bought Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. In other words, one of the largest and most influential companies on earth did nothing wrong when it scooped up two rising competitors that millions of people were flocking to.
If that sounds like a strange conclusion, that’s because it is. The ruling says Meta is not a monopoly. If that is true, we might need a new dictionary.
The entire decision rests on the idea that Meta faces plenty of competition. The judge pointed to TikTok and YouTube as proof that Facebook and Instagram are not all-powerful. This is a little like arguing that Walmart cannot dominate retail because people also buy things at the local farmers’ market. Yes, TikTok exists. That does not mean Meta is some scrappy underdog.
Looking at the market through a funhouse mirror
The government argued that Meta dominates personal social networking. That is the space where people connect with friends and family, share photos, send messages and scroll through updates from the people they know. This is the core of what Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp do.
Meta pushed back by reframing the market so broadly that almost anything counted as competition. If a platform lets you view videos or communicate in some way, Meta argued that it belongs in the same category. Suddenly YouTube, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Reddit and pretty much anything with a login became fair game.
The judge accepted this view. Once the market was stretched to that size, it became almost impossible to say Meta held a monopoly. Which was exactly the point.
The evidence told a very different story
What makes this ruling more frustrating is what the evidence showed. Meta’s internal messages made it clear the company saw Instagram and WhatsApp as real threats. Executives said so directly. They worried that these smaller platforms could grow fast and compete for the same users. They did not want to risk it.
So Meta did what a company with almost unlimited resources does. It bought them.
This is a simple narrative. A giant company saw emerging rivals. It acquired them before they got too big. The result was a clear reduction in competition. Yet the court rejected that exact story and replaced it with something much hazier.
Our antitrust system is not built for companies this large
The ruling also reveals a deeper problem. To win the case, the government had to prove something impossible to prove. It needed to show that Instagram and WhatsApp would have become massive competitors if Meta had not bought them.
That is like asking someone to prove what their life would have looked like if they had moved to a different city 10 years ago. You can guess. You cannot prove it.
Antitrust law was written for a different era. Today’s tech giants move faster than regulators ever can. By the time the government files a case, the market has already shifted again. Meanwhile, companies like Meta keep growing and keep folding more products into their ecosystem.
This ruling rewards that speed. It tells large companies that if they acquire rivals early enough, while things are still developing, regulators will never be able to catch up.
The future of competition just got harder
The timing could not be worse. Meta is now pushing into artificial intelligence in ways that raise even bigger questions about power and control. The company owns the world’s largest social networks. It owns the messaging platforms used by billions of people. Now it is feeding all of that data into its next generation of AI tools.
If we cannot define a monopoly in the social media world, how will we define one in the AI world? How will we protect competition when the next big platforms do not even resemble the ones we use today?
The judge’s ruling may stand on firm legal ground, but it does not reflect how people actually live online. When most of your social life, communication and digital identity flow through one company, that company has enormous power. And once it buys up its rivals, it has even more.
This decision tells us that our system is struggling to recognize what dominance looks like in the modern internet. If we cannot see Meta as a monopoly, we have officially lost the thread.
Aron Solomon is the chief strategy officer for Amplify. He holds a law degree and has taught entrepreneurship at McGill University and the University of Pennsylvania, and was elected to Fastcase 50, recognizing the top 50 legal innovators in the world. His writing has been featured in Newsweek, The Hill, Fast Company, Fortune, , CBS News, CNBC, USA Today and many other publications. He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for his op-ed in The Independent exposing the NFL’s “race-norming” policies.
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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