Meta’s antitrust test could cause Zuckerberg to sell Instagram

An examination of the groundbreaking antitrust case against the social media giant meta will begin in Washington on Monday.

US competition and consumer watchdogs claim that Meta, which already owns Facebook, bought Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 to eliminate competition and effectively give it monopoly.

The FTC reviewed and approved these acquisitions, but committed to monitoring the results. If the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) wins the case, they can have Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg sell both Instagram and WhatsApp.

Meta previously said he was sure it would win, and experts likely would claim to the BBC that Instagram users have had a better experience since they took over.

“The (FTC) debate is that getting Instagram was a way to neutralize this competitive threat to Facebook,” said Rebecca Haw Allensworth, anti-trust professor at Vanderbilt Law School.

Ms. Allensworth says Zuckerberg’s own words, including those from his emails, may provide the most persuasive evidence at the trial.

“He said it’s better to buy than compete. It’s harder to be literal than that,” said Allensworth.

On the other hand, Meta is likely to argue that intentions are not particularly relevant in the case of antitrust.

“The real question is, is consumers better as a result of this merger?”,” she said. “They will provide a lot of evidence that Instagram has benefited from being owned by Facebook and have become what it is today.”

Zuckerberg and the company’s former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg are both expected to testify at trial and could run for several weeks.

This incident, FTC V Meta, was submitted during President Donald Trump’s first administration, but there is a risk of being politicized in his second term.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Zuckerberg lobbyed Trump directly and removed the FTC.

When asked by the BBC to confirm the report, Meta declined to question, but said in a statement:

“More than a decade after the FTC reviewed and cleared the acquisition, the Commission’s lawsuit in this case sends a message that the transaction is not truly final,” a spokesman for Meta told the BBC.

Zuckerberg’s relationship with Trump was frozen after Trump was banned from Meta’s social media platforms after the US Capitol in January 2021.

Since then, the relationship has been thawed somewhat.

Meta has donated $1 million (£764,400) to Trump’s first fund, and announced in January that Trump’s alliance, Ultimate Fighting Championship Fighter (UFC), boss Dana White, will be joining the board.

The company also announced in January that it would remove independent fact-checkers.

The incident also lies in President Trump’s move to fire two FTC commissioners in March.

As Democrats, Rebecca Kelly’s Massacre and Alvaro Bedoya were minorities on the five-seat committee.

Until Wednesday, only two of these seats had been filled by Republicans. Another Republican was confirmed by the Senate Thursday.

The massacre and the Bedoyas — who are suing to revive the Trump administration — say the move to push them out was intended to threaten them.

“The President sent a very clear signal not only to us, but to President Ferguson and President Commissioner (Melissa) Holyoak.

“So if they don’t want to give his political allies a favor, they’re in the chopping block as well,” Slaughter said.

Slaughter and Bedoya have raised an alarm in a recent report on Zuckerberg’s lobbying efforts.

“My hope is that there is no political interference,” Bedoya told the BBC.

The FTC did not respond to requests for comment from the BBC.

Ferguson, who was appointed FTC chair by Trump, said he would “follow a legitimate order” when asked what he would do if the president instructed him to stop a lawsuit like a lawsuit against Meta.

Ferguson added that he would be very surprised if such a thing happened.

The FTC is considered an important antitrust watchdog. In recent years, in addition to passing laws banning junk fees and subscription traps, it has also returned hundreds of millions of dollars to victims of fraud.

But once the meta-tests begin, it is one of many independent regulators that the administration wants to curb.

Chairman Ferguson has recently been quoted as reaffirming his belief that independent regulators are “not good for democracy.”

FTC vmeta enters another major antitrust case – USA v Google – called the Relief Stage.

The Justice Department took the first phase of the case last summer when Judge Amit Mehta discovered that Google had held its monopoly in online searches and had a market share of about 90%.

Last month, the DOJ reiterated the demand made during the Biden administration that the court would dissolve Google’s search monopoly.

Laura Phillips Saur, an associate professor of business law at the University of Georgia, said the FTC lawsuit against Meta would be difficult to prove.

“I think they have a real, tough fight,” Phillips Saur said of the FTC.

“They have a long way to go before considering selling Instagram or WhatsApp.”

That’s because there’s more competition in the personal network services field run by Meta compared to online search, Phillips Soher said.

Meta’s statement said the evidence at the trial “shows what every 17 years of age around the world knows: Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp compete with China-owned Tiktok, YouTube, X, Imessage and more.”