A judge shut down the FTC’s push to unwind Meta’s Instagram and WhatsApp buys, saying the deals didn’t choke competition or justify a breakup
Jens Büttner/picture alliance via Getty Images
Meta $META’s decade-old spending spree just survived the government’s biggest swing at it. A federal judge ruled Tuesday that the company’s purchases of Instagram (in 2012) and WhatsApp (in 2014) didn’t stifle competition, killing the Federal Trade Commission’s attempts to unwind the deals years later.
The ruling is a decisive win for Meta, as U.S. District Judge James Boasberg said the FTC failed to prove that Meta holds monopoly power in the “personal social networking” space today or that the two acquisitions illegally helped maintain such a monopoly. He said that without evidence that Meta still dominates a well-defined market, the federal challenge couldn’t stand.
The FTC had asked the court to order Meta to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp, arguing they were “killer acquisitions” that neutralized fast-growing rivals and locked users inside Meta’s ecosystem — part of a “buy or bury” playbook.
“The Court ultimately concludes that the agency has not carried its burden: Meta holds no monopoly in the relevant market,” Boasberg wrote. “The landscape that existed only five years ago when the Federal Trade Commission brought this antitrust suit has changed markedly. While it once might have made sense to partition apps into separate markets of social networking and social media, that wall has since broken down.”
The government’s case leaned on a tight market definition and a long paper trail. The FTC described a world where Facebook and Instagram dominated the space for connecting with friends and family, and highlighted internal emails where Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said it was “better to buy than compete” and saw Instagram as a serious mobile threat. Those messages, regulators argued, showed a “buy or bury” strategy that kept potential challengers from ever maturing.
Meta pushed back with a much broader map of competition. The company’s lawyers argued the FTC had airbrushed out the apps users actually bounce between — rivals such as TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, Apple $AAPL’s iMessage, and others — and that attention, not friend lists, defines today’s real market. Boasberg ultimately agreed that leaving out TikTok and YouTube broke the agency’s theory, writing that adding TikTok alone was enough to sink the case. In his opinion, he even reached for Greek philosopher Heraclitus, noting that the social media “river” the FTC sued over has “changed markedly” since 2020.
The ruling closes a case that has been making its way through the courts since December 2020, when the Trump-era FTC and 46 states sued Facebook, accusing it of illegally maintaining a social-networking monopoly through the Instagram and WhatsApp deals. Boasberg tossed the first version of the complaint in 2021 as too thin on monopoly evidence, but he let a beefed-up filing proceed in 2022. A long delay over trial timing pushed the case into April this year, when Zuckerberg, WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, and a slate of economists took the stand in a weekslong bench trial.
By the end of the trial, the question wasn’t whether the deals were huge — they were — but whether regulators could prove they harmed today’s market enough to justify tearing them apart. They couldn’t.
The ruling also hands Meta a clean win at a sensitive moment: Instagram now sits at the center of Meta’s ad business and Reels strategy, while WhatsApp underpins its global messaging, payments, and business tools push in markets where phone numbers matter more than email addresses. Keeping both safe under one roof lets Meta keep building cross-app products and AI-powered recommendation systems without a court-ordered breakup looming in the background.
A separate ruling still hangs over Meta’s legal calendar, a reminder that the company’s courtroom attendance streak isn’t finished yet. Another federal judge is weighing a consumer-privacy case over company’s handling of user data — a very different fight, but one with enough scope to jolt Meta’s playbook if it breaks the wrong way.
The FTC can appeal to the D.C. Circuit, and regulators are still pursuing antitrust campaigns against other Big Tech companies (see: Amazon $AMZN, Google $GOOGL, and Apple). But the FTC’s loss on Tuesday underscores how difficult it is to unwind decade-old deals in fast-moving markets. The outcome keeps Meta’s two most important acquisitions in its history intact — and leaves the government without the breakup it spent years trying to build toward.
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