(Bloomberg) – The Federal Trade Commission finally confronts Meta Platforms Inc. in court and believes that the company had to illegally monopolize the social media market more than a decade ago when it bought Instagram and WhatsApp.
The opening ceremony of the FTC Salvo began in Washington on Monday, with Chief Justice James Boasberg in this case for many years. Institutional attorneys plan to make an opening argument in the company’s defense.
If FTC prevails, derivatives from Instagram and WhatsApp will undo the integration between the apps, undermine the world’s two most popular digital consumer products and potentially remove hundreds of billions of dollars in Meta market value. This will also raise serious questions about how the government evaluates and approves the transaction.
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson said in a warning of overregulation: “Antitrust laws can help ensure that no private sector companies have become so powerful that in an interview with FOX Business on Monday morning, our lives will affect our lives in a real adverse impact on all Americans. “That’s the purpose of this trial starting today.” ”
The trial is expected to last about two months and provides testimony from CEO Mark Zuckerberg and former executive Sheryl Sandberg.
The FTC believes Meta-buying Instagram and WhatsApp are “killer acquisitions” that prevent these companies from competing. To support the case where its components are monopoly, the FTC will argue that the quality of its applications has declined, most notably advertising has increased and weakened privacy protections.
Meta is actively opposing the FTC’s claims, believing it competes with various platforms, including Bytedance Ltd.’s Tiktok, Snap Inc.’s Snapchat, Google’s YouTube, Apple Inc.’s Imessage and Elon Musk’s X.
The FTC may be tough in court. Although Boasberg denied Meta’s motion to file a case in November, he said: “However, it’s widespread here and does not conceal the difficult question of whether the committee can stick to its claims in the trial crucible.”
Meta also believes that the FTC has the opportunity to challenge the deals – Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 – to allow them to continue.
The FTC investigated META in the first Trump administration in 2019 and sued the company in December 2020. The Biden administration, led by former FTC Chairman Lina Khan, filed a lawsuit, which is now in the hands of Ferguson, who is in charge of Ferguson, named January by President Donald Trump.
The case will test the government’s ability to compete in police in a rapidly growing field of technology, which is growing rapidly. Since 2019, Musk has purchased Twitter Inc., Tiktok has become one of the world’s most important social media apps, and Meta has launched rival products to compete with both of them.
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