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The US Federal Trade Commission has appealed against a ruling that Meta does not hold an illegal monopoly in a move that will prolong one of Washington’s highest-profile antitrust fights against Big Tech.
The FTC on Tuesday filed an appeal with the US appeals court for the District of Columbia after Meta in November won a case that threatened to break apart the tech giant.
Daniel Guarnera, director of the FTC’s competition bureau, on Tuesday said: “Meta has maintained its dominant position and record profits for well over a decade not through legitimate competition, but by buying its most significant competitive threats.”
“The [Donald] Trump, [JD] Vance FTC will continue fighting its historic case against Meta to ensure that competition can thrive across the country to the benefit of all Americans and US businesses,” he added.
Meta said: “The district court’s decision to reject the FTC’s arguments is correct and recognises the fierce competition we face. We will remain focused on innovating and investing in America.”
Big Tech bosses have turbocharged efforts to woo President Trump in his second term in office, donating millions of dollars to his inauguration fund and pledging investments across the US.
Although tech groups have gained regulatory relief and some government contracts, the White House has not dropped monopoly cases, some of which were launched during the president’s first term.
In his ruling in November, judge James Boasberg said the regulator had failed to sufficiently prove that Meta had maintained monopoly power by adopting a “buy-or-bury” strategy.
As part of a broader push to break up Big Tech, initiated during Trump’s first term and escalated by Lina Khan, then-head of the FTC during Joe Biden’s presidency, the agency has sought to unwind Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, for $1bn and $19bn respectively.
“The company broke the law” with these two takeovers, a senior FTC official said on Tuesday. “A dominant firm like that can’t eliminate its rivals and potential rivals by purchasing them.”
Boasberg in November agreed with Meta’s defence that it had competed with TikTok and Google’s YouTube, which the FTC maintained did not come under the definition of “personal networking”.
He also argued that “whether or not Meta enjoyed monopoly power in the past . . . the agency must show that it continues to hold such power now” — a requirement, he said, the FTC had failed to meet.
The senior FTC official disagreed with the need to prove that the company retained a monopoly at a trial held five years after the agency first filed its lawsuit.
“Ask the wrong question and you get the wrong answer,” the official said. “Judge Boasberg’s approach was a fundamental error that let Meta sweep its misconduct under the rug.”
Meta chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has sought to court Trump over the past year, praising him publicly and relaxing the company’s moderation rules in response to Republican fears over the censorship of conservatives. However, the tech group’s efforts to lobby the White House to settle the case ahead of the trial were unsuccessful.
The US appears to be losing its battle to break up Big Tech following setbacks in several major monopoly cases because judges shied away from ordering some of the world’s biggest companies to split themselves up.
A federal judge in a separate 2024 case found Google had maintained an illegal monopoly but later declined to order a divestiture of its Chrome or Android operating system as the Department of Justice requested.