Shortly after Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in 2004 in his dormitory of Harvard, the social network raised in popularity. About ten years later, the company experienced a new round of explosive growth after buying its smaller rivals Instagram and WhatsApp, confirming his place in social media.
On Monday, judge James Boasberg of the American court for the District or Columbia will start considering a milestone monopoly case in which the company is involved is now called meta on a new legal question: did it violate the law to remain dominant by acquiring the start-ups that stood in the way?
The case – Federal Trade Commission v. Meta platforms – will try for the first time to stretch the theories of the American antitrust legislation to include which supervisors call a strategy “Buy of Bury”. Meta has violated the law by acquiring emerging competitors to maintain its monopoly in social networks, argues the FTC. Regulators try to force Meta to emit Instagram and WhatsApp.
Meta has prevented it to be confronted with sufficient competition in social media from Tiktok, Snap, Reddit and LinkedIn, and that supervisors approved the acquisitions at that time. The company also did not give up to arrange the case: at the beginning of this month, Mr. Zuckerberg was in the White House to try to persuade the Trump government to prevent a process.
The outcome of what is expected to be a multi -week test, the first major technical case continued by the Trump administration, could reform the American antitrust landscape because companies are dealing with intense research into mergers and acquisitions. A victory from the government could also have wrinkle effects for Silicon Valley, where start-ups banks on lucrative acquisitions by larger companies for payouts.
Nevertheless, the FTC stands for a tough struggle to prove the case, said legal experts. The government's legal argument depends on demonstrating that Meta would not have been as dominant and would not have remained dominant, if the Instagram and WhatsApp had not acquired – a hypothetical situation that is difficult to prove because many factors have played the growth of the company.
“This is a critical test for the question of whether the antitrust laws can be used to relax mergers designed to eliminate the starting competition,” said Gene Kimmelman, a former high officer in the antitrust department of the Ministry of Justice. “A victory for the government would give consumers more choices and opportunities to switch social media platforms without having to be on Facebook.”
The lawsuit has dual support and is part of the most aggressive trust -busting effort of federal supervisors since the gilded age, with Google, Meta, Amazon and Apple who have questions about their power to control the way in which consumers shop, find and communicate.
The Ministry of Justice won an antitrust case against Google last year for monopolizing internet research and a test to determine how to remedy that Monopoly is planned to start on 21 April. Google is also waiting for the decision of a judge in a separate test on claims that it illegally has illegally crushed competition in the advertising market.
The DOJ has also sued Apple due to claims that the tightly knitted system of devices and software makes it a challenge for consumers to leave. And the FTC has sued Amazon and accuses the illegal protection of a monopoly in online retail. It is expected that those cases will come to court next year.
The technical industry is closely aware of the Meta test, one of the first important signals of how aggressive President Trump the most powerful technology companies can in fact. The case was created under his first administration, before a transfer in 2021 at the FTC chairman Lina Khan, a Biden appointed who drawn attention to her search to break technical monopolies.
Now Andrew Ferguson, the choice of Mr. Trump to lead the desk in Leiden, has taken over. He has warned of Meta's concentrated power. He is also motivated by a shared Republican view that technical platforms have censored content, in particular conservative voices.
“We are not going to get our feet off the gas,” Mr. Ferguson said last month in an interview with Bloomberg.
For Meta, even the idea of averting in Instagram and WhatsApp is alarming. The company bought Instagram for $ 1 billion in 2012 and WhatsApp for $ 19 billion in 2014. At the time of the deals, the apps were small – Instagram had only 30 million users and 13 employees, while WhatsApp had 450 million users and 50 employees. Since then, both have become crucial for Meta, with faster growth and involvement by users than Facebook.
The process is expected to contain about seven hours of witness from Mr. Zuckerberg, who will be a star -witness, together with the former Chief Operating Officer of Meta, Sheryl Sandberg, and the founders of Instagram and WhatsApp.
Meta has an army of the most expensive and experienced litigation that argued his defense, led by Mark C. Hansen, a partner at Kellogg, Hansen, Todd, Figel & Frederick. Meta is planning to claim that the rapid rise of the video-sharing site Tiktok in particular shows healthy competition in the market.
“We are convinced that the evidence during the process shows that the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp have been good for competition and consumers,” said Chris Sgro, a spokesperson for Meta. “The committee is wrong to claim that no deal is ever really final and that companies can be punished for innovating.”
The FTC first sued Meta in December 2020, in addition to a similar suit with 46 states. The legal argument of the agency depends on section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which indicates that it is illegal to maintain a monopoly by using anti -competitive practices – in this case companies about acquiring a premium as a strategy to eliminate them as competitors.
To support the case, the FTC is planning to present an e -mail from 2008 by Mr. Zuckerberg and says: “It's better to buy than to compete” and a memo from 2012 that he wrote and said that his motivation for buying Instagram was “neutral[izing] A potential competitor. “
Judge Boasberg, who is locked up in a controversial court fight with the Trump government on the use of a powerful status in wartime to briefly deport Venezuelan migrants, will decide the case. During a recent pretrial tutorial, the judge said that he had never had a personal Facebook or Instagram account.
Judge Boasberg rejected the initial case of the FTC in June 2021 and said that the agency should give stronger definitions for the social media market and how Meta had come to monopolize it. He accepted a re -entered version of the case in January 2022, but warned that it was far from a slam -dunk.
In a ruling against Meta's motion to reject the case last year, Judge Boasberg said that the FTC “is confronted with hard questions about whether his claims can stand in the melting pot of the trial.”
“Indeed, his positions sometimes tension the cracking antitrust results from this country to their limits,” he added.
Legal experts say that the case will be a challenge to prove, because it depends on determining the intentions by managers more than ten years ago, during a completely different internet age. The deals were currently approved by supervisors, and years of integration between the apps mean that they share many of the same internal systems and data – a disintegrating challenging.
“It asks a judge to decide whether Meta tried to kill the competition or had happiness and made a good gamble,” said Jennifer Huddleston, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a think tank. “It is true that we can know a countercase that we cannot know.”
