The Federal Trade Commission Won't Give Up Its Crusade Against Meta
The government insists that Meta has a monopoly. If anything, the social media market is fiercely competitive.
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced on Tuesday that it will appeal the ruling in its monopoly case against Meta. Legal and economic antitrust experts see no way the FTC can win on appeal, given the factual findings of the federal court in November.
While the actual appeal has not yet been filed, the FTC Bureau of Competition Director Daniel Guarnera said that "the Trump-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 U.S. businesses." The decision to appeal, coupled with Guarnera's statement, is yet more evidence that President Donald Trump's FTC has embraced the big-is-bad mantra of its Democratic predecessor.
The FTC brought its lawsuit against Meta under Trump's first administration in December 2020, alleging that the company violated the Sherman Antitrust Act's prohibition on monopolies by purchasing Instagram and WhatsApp. Nearly five years later, Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled in no uncertain terms that Meta doesn't have anything approaching a monopoly in the social media market.
The FTC argued that Meta maintained a monopoly in the personal social networking market, which it defined as including Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and MeWe (a privacy-focused social network). In such a narrow market, Meta's market share would be 85 percent of time spent, per the FTC's April 2025 opening statement slides. Boasberg rejected the FTC's definition in favor of Meta's social media market, which includes YouTube and TikTok, based on overwhelming economic evidence showing users substitute these apps for Instagram and Facebook. In this market, Boasberg found Meta's "share…comes out to around 30% of time spent."
Boasberg cites much case law to establish that 30 percent is a "modest share [that] cannot establish monopoly power." Examples include the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit's ruling in Blue Cross & Blue Shield United of Wis. v. Marshfield Clinic, which found "fifty percent is below any accepted benchmark for inferring monopoly power from market share," and the 2nd Circuit's ruling in United States v. Aluminum Co. of America, which concluded that "it is doubtful whether sixty or sixty-four percent would be enough [to establish monopoly]; and certainly thirty-three per cent is not." Meta's 30 percent share is substantially below the former, and less than the latter.
Given Meta's mere plurality of the social media market, the FTC's path to victory is opaque at best, and likely impossible.
Brian Albrecht, chief economist at the International Center for Law and Economics, tells Reason that the FTC faces "an uphill battle." Albrecht says it's unlikely that the FTC will challenge Boasberg's findings of fact, but "whether [he] applied the correct framework for market definition, whether he demanded a form of proof that antitrust law doesn't require, or whether he excluded or discounted evidence for legally improper reasons." The success of this strategy is doubtful because Boasberg, "by most accounts, engaged seriously with the standard antitrust tools [and]…found the FTC's market definition unconvincing after weighing the evidence, not on a technicality," explains Albrecht.
Albrecht is joined in his evaluation of the FTC's likelihood of appellate success by Joe Coniglio, director of antitrust and innovation at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation. Conligio says "there is virtually no chance that [Boasberg's] robust factual findings will be found clearly erroneous on appeal" and tells Reason that "the FTC's only conceivable hope is to prove that Judge Boasberg got the law wrong in holding that the FTC 'had to show that Meta is violating the law now.'" But Coniglio says Boasberg got the law right and describes the FTC's decision to appeal as "a very poor use of the FTC's prosecutorial discretion to spend thousands, if not millions, more of American taxpayers' money on a case that was always a loser."
Losing at the district level was insufficiently embarrassing for the federal antitrust regulator, whose decision to appeal evidences a combination of stubbornness and masochism.
