Meta is currently facing an antitrust lawsuit from the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) regarding its purchase of WhatsApp and Instagram. Facing accusations of illegally maintaining a monopoly of the social networking market through anti-competitive acquisitions, Meta stands the risk of losing WhatsApp and Instagram.
Back in December 2020, the FTC, alongside a coalition of attorneys general of 46 states, filed a lawsuit against Meta (then Facebook) regarding its acquisition of Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion and WhatsApp in 2014 for $19 billion. The FTC argued the acquisition was Meta’s means to eliminate threats to its monopoly.
It further argued that the monopolization leaves consumers with few options to choose from in the social networking sphere, harms healthy competition, and deprives advertisers of the benefits of competition.
The goal of the lawsuit was to get a permanent order that would require Facebook to sell off some of its businesses, including Instagram and WhatsApp; prohibit Facebook from imposing anticompetitive conditions on software developers; and require Facebook to inform and seek permission from the FTC for future mergers and acquisitions.
Judge James E. Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia dismissed the lawsuits against Meta made by the FTC in June 2021, stating the agency did not sufficiently demonstrate that Meta had monopoly power.
However, in August 2021, the FTC successfully applied for a retrial when the court denied Meta’s second motion to dismiss, giving way for the high-stakes trial that commenced on April 14, 2025.
The trial kicked off in Washington, D.C. federal court on Monday, April 14, with U.S. District Judge James Boasberg presiding over the case. During the trial, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO and Facebook founder, spent almost 10 hours on the stand and was confronted with emails dating back to the 2010s about Facebook’s schemes to eliminate the competition it had back then.
One of such emails was a message from 2011, where Zuckerberg had recognized Instagram as a “large and viable competitor,” and another from 2012, where Zuckerberg had said, “Messenger isn’t beating WhatsApp; Instagram was growing so much faster than us that we had to buy them for $1 billion.”
According to The Hill, the FTC further presented private messages between Facebook’s current chief operating officer, Javier Olivian, and Zuckerberg, where he shared his concerns about WhatsApp growth.
In the message, Olivian had told Zuckerberg, “I’ve been thinking hard about this for the past couple of sleepless nights since I am really worried…these guys are the real deal.”
In lieu of evidence the FTC had against Meta, Sheryl Sandberg, the former chief operating officer of Meta, was questioned regarding a message she sent in 2011 when Google launched Google+, an unsuccessful social platform intended to compete with Facebook. In the message she had to staffers, “The most important thing to acknowledge is that for the first time we have real competition and consumers have real choice.”
The FTC further presented evidence to back this up by presenting a news report from Bloomberg, where a year later Sandberg said she would block Google from advertising on Facebook. Sandberg argued it was to motivate her staff: “I said that to rally troops.”
As the second week of the trial kicked off, Kevin Systrom, a co-founder of Instagram, took the stand on Tuesday, April 22, against Meta, saying his start-up was starved of resources after Meta bought it because Zuckerberg was afraid of the success of the photo-sharing app.
Systrom spent more than six hours supporting the FTC’s legal argument that Meta had purchased Instagram in 2012 as part of a buy-or-bury strategy to illegally cement its social media monopoly by killing off its rivals.
Systrom made millions of dollars when Meta purchased his company but sharply contradicted Meta’s defense during his hours on the stand. He countered that he left Meta in 2018 due to Zuckerberg’s lack of investment.
According to his argument, Instagram had grown to 1 billion users, which was 40% of Facebook’s size, but Instagram only had 1,000 employees, compared to the 35,000 employees Facebook had. “We were by far the fastest-growing team. We produced the most revenue, and relative to what we should have been at that time, I felt like we should have been much larger,” said Systrom.
Mark Zuckerberg, the first witness called by the FTC last week, said Meta provided significant technological assistance to Instagram, including Meta’s spam filtering technology and its computing system for storing data and running the app.
In response to this, Systrom testified that Instagram wasn’t reliant on Meta for its basic technological needs, as Instagram already had a solid technology infrastructure provided by Amazon. Systrom argued that from the time of Instagram’s launch in 2010, it had 25,000 users on its first day, and by January 2012, they had amassed four million users a month.
Meta’s attorney, Kevin Huff, during a cross-examination, tried to counter Systrom’s earlier testimony by bringing up instances in the past where Systrom had publicly praised the benefits and support Instagram received after its acquisition by Facebook.
He mentioned how Systrom had said in an interview that he was barely holding the app together by “duct tape,” and how Instagram grew more quickly being a part of Facebook.
The FTC, however, submitted an email dating to February 11, 2012, where Zuckerberg said he sought to “keep their product running and not just add more features to it.” FTC also argued the fact that other investors wanted to buy or invest in Instagram, which could have made it a true rival.
Meta’s future lies greatly on the results of the trial, as it stands to lose its $165 billion advertising business, Instagram, and WhatsApp should it lose the trial.
As the FTC is actively pushing its “buy or bury” allegations against Meta, Rebecca Allensworth, an antitrust law expert and Vanderbilt associate dean for research, on Thursday, April 17, told Quartz, “So far the government has done a good job using Zuckerberg’s own words against him, and he has done a good job deflecting them to the degree possible.”
She further added, “But there is only so much Zuckerberg can do now to walk back on what he said then. These are the worst facts of the case from Meta’s perspective, and the government laid some important blows.”
