Facebook owner Meta Platforms META.O must face trial in a US Federal Trade Commission lawsuit seeking its break up over claims that it bought Instagram and WhatsApp to crush emerging competition in social media, a judge in Washington ruled on Wednesday.
The FTC sued Meta's Facebook in 2020, during the Trump administration, alleging that the company acted illegally to maintain its social network monopoly.
Meta, then known as Facebook, overpaid for Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 to eliminate nascent threats instead of competing on its own in the mobile ecosystem, the FTC claimed.
FTC's narrow market view
Meta argued that the FTC's case depended on an overly narrow view of social media markets and did not take into account competition from ByteDance's TikTok, Google's YouTube, X, and Microsoft's MSFT.O LinkedIn.
The case is one of five blockbuster lawsuits where antitrust regulators at the FTC and U.S. Department of Justice are going after Big Tech.
Amazon.com Inc AMZN.O and Apple AAPL.O are both being sued, and Alphabet's GOOGL.O Google is facing two lawsuits, including one where a judge recently found it unlawfully thwarted competition among online search engines.