(Bloomberg) – The Federal Trade Commission ended the case of breaking down Meta Platforms Inc. into an illegal social media monopoly, and the company will now develop a defense in the ongoing antitrust trial.
Meta will spend the next few weeks filing a lawsuit in front of U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in Washington. The company also said Thursday that the government failed to prove its case and that it would file a motion to him in its favor.
So far, the trial’s high-profile testimony has come from including Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg and former COO Sheryl Sandberg.
The FTC, which hopes Meta is separated from Instagram and WhatsApp, claims the company has a monopoly in the market for “personal social networking services” that consists of products focused on sharing online with friends and family. The agency believes that the monopoly allows the RMB to reduce the quality of its products, including reducing the quality of its products through weaker privacy protections and increased advertising volumes.
Meta believes that the FTC market definition is too narrow, excluding competitors such as Bytedance Ltd.’s Tiktok, Google’s YouTube and Apple Inc.’s Imessage.
The FTC has not raised questions about Meta competing with companies in markets such as messaging and video, but it claims that the company’s only real competitor is Snapchat from Snap Inc. in its core market for communicating with friends and family.
Meta countered that social media has changed in recent years, with people using various digital means to communicate, including messaging and sharing videos. Meta believed throughout the first five weeks of the trial that the government could not prove any harm to its users.
The company is starting a defense by calling Snap employees, including its CIO Saral Jain, whose testimony is largely sealed.
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