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After five years, Meta has emerged victorious from a U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) lawsuit over its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.<\/p>\n
In an opinion released Tuesday<\/a>, U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg wrote that the FTC did not prove that Meta was violating antitrust law when it bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012, and WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014.<\/p>\n The FTC did manage to surface evidence showing that Meta \u2014 then called Facebook \u2014 was concerned about Instagram\u2019s fast growth and the competition it could pose.<\/p>\n \u201cOne way of looking at this is that what we\u2019re really buying is time,\u201d Mark Zuckerberg wrote in February 2012, per internal Facebook emails that surfaced during the trial. \u201cEven if some new competitors springs [sic] up, buying Instagram, Path, Foursquare, etc. now will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get close to their scale again.\u201d<\/p>\n But Judge Boasberg was not ruling on whether Meta had acted as a monopoly back then, but rather, if it is currently a monopoly. Boasberg pointed to apps like TikTok as evidence that Meta has competition.<\/p>\n \u201cThe landscape that existed only five years ago, when the Federal Trade Commission brought this antitrust suit has changed markedly,\u201d Boasberg wrote<\/a> in his memorandum opinion. \u201cWhile it once might have made sense to partition apps into separate markets of social networking and social media, that wall has since broken down.\u201d<\/p>\n Techcrunch event<\/p>\n