Trump Sued to Break up Meta in 2020. It’s Finally Going to Trial.

The Washington Post

12:54 JST, April 13, 2025

When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg bought the photo-sharing app Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, the internet looked a lot different. Snapchat was in its infancy. TikTok didn’t exist. Only half the country used social networking sites at all.

More than a decade later, antitrust regulators are taking Meta to court, arguing that the company’s pattern of buying or crushing would-be competitors has illegally enabled it to reap billions in advertising dollars while depriving users of more vibrant social media options.

The Federal Trade Commission opens its case Monday in Washington challenging Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp in one of the agency’s highest-profile efforts to rein in the power of Big Tech. Meta now joins Google as the first tech giants to face federal trial over antitrust complaints since Microsoft in 1998.

The lawsuit, first filed in 2020, is the latest test of courts’ willingness to embrace a wider definition of anticompetitive conduct to address the power of Silicon Valley companies that offer their services to consumers free. If Chief Judge James E. Boasberg of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia finds in the FTC’s favor, it could lead to an order for a historic corporate breakup splitting Instagram and WhatsApp from Meta and its original platform, Facebook.

It also represents the first court clash of President Donald Trump’s current term with the tech sector, which has openly courted his favor in hopes of more favorable treatment than it got under President Joe Biden. It comes as Trump holds in his hands the fate of TikTok, Meta’s fiercest rival for online attention, thanks to a divest-or-ban law that he has chosen not to enforce.

Last year, a federal court ruled Google an illegal monopoly that violated antitrust law by hammering out restrictive contracts with Apple and other phone makers requiring them to set Google as the default search engine on smartphones. A court is expected to decide this month what the consequences for Google will be, while another judge is formulating a ruling on whether the company’s advertising business also operates as a monopoly.

The Meta trial could help determine whether major tech companies will maintain their advantages in the marketplace just as the rise of generative artificial intelligence is opening the door to disruptive new players.

“It’s not against the antitrust laws to be a big company,” a senior FTC official said this week in a briefing with reporters. “But one of the reasons the U.S. economy is the most dynamic and innovative in the world is that even big companies have to compete fair and square and on the merits of their products.”

Meta spokesman Chris Sgro said in a statement that the FTC’s lawsuit “defies reality,” arguing the company already faces intense competition.

“The evidence at trial will show what every 17-year-old in the world knows: Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp compete with Chinese-owned TikTok, YouTube, X, iMessage and many others,” Sgro said. “Regulators should be supporting American innovation, rather than seeking to break up a great American company and further advantaging China on critical issues like AI.”

When the FTC and the Justice Department started investigating the market power of big tech companies in 2019, Meta’s political fortunes in Washington were at a low point. Democratic antitrust reformers were calling for the government to break up Big Tech, arguing that internet companies had become monopolies strangling competition and consumer choice. A growing number of Republicans – including Trump – were also taking aim at Facebook and other platforms, arguing they held too much power over speech and were biased against conservatives.

More recently, Meta and some other tech giants have sought to align themselves with the second Trump administration by donating to his inauguration committee and adopting more conservative rhetoric and policies. Most recently, Zuckerberg traveled to the White House to lobby the Trump administration to get the FTC to resolve the lawsuit, The Washington Post and other outlets have reported.

The social media market has also shifted over the past few years. The viral popularity of TikTok has made short-form video a leading format across the industry, prompting tech giants to respond with competing products, including Meta’s Instagram Reels, and giving rise to a cottage industry of video influencers. Elon Musk’s purchase of X has tilted that platform to the political right, accelerating a trend in which users migrate to niche platforms such as Discord, Telegram and Bluesky where they can find like-minded communities.

“Flash forward to today – and even 2020 when the case was first brought – our social usage has become so much more fragmented,” said eMarketer analyst Jasmine Enberg. “While Facebook is still the most used social media platform overall, if you look at younger generations, for example, TikTok is much more popular.”

The FTC’s initial lawsuit against Meta, filed under Trump in 2020, was dismissed in June 2021 by Boasberg. He ruled that the government had failed to show enough evidence to prove that Facebook held a monopoly over the “personal social networking” market, which the agency defined as a collection of apps that allow people to maintain relationships with their friends and family.

The FTC refiled its suit in August 2021, and this time Boasberg allowed it to move forward, finding that the government had offered “more robust and detailed” evidence that Meta dominates a well-defined niche in the social media market. The government argues that the ephemeral messaging app Snapchat is Meta’s next-biggest competitor. Meta counters that it competes in a much broader market for online attention that includes the likes of TikTok, YouTube and X. The company also contends that its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp have benefited consumers.

“If the market is ‘all social networking sites,’ then Facebook is probably not a monopolist, because there are quite a few sites,” said Herbert Hovenkamp, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. “So at that point, the government kind of changed its tune and said, well, these are really friends-and-family websites … and that’s a smaller number of social networks within that market.”

William Kovacic, a professor of law at George Washington University and a former FTC chair, said proving Meta has a monopoly despite some obvious competitors in the wider social media sector is one of the government’s biggest hurdles.

Since Meta bought Instagram in 2012, the number of popular internet platforms has ballooned. In 2012, 90.7 percent of social media users used Facebook, while 22.8 percent used Twitter and 18 percent used LinkedIn, according to data from eMarketer. By 2025, only 75.3 percent of social media users were using Facebook, followed by 62.9 percent of users on Instagram and 49.9 percent who used TikTok, according to the eMarketer data.

To make its case that Meta acted anti-competitively, the FTC relies on internal correspondence that shows the company’s top executives saw Instagram and WhatsApp as threats to their business, especially as the company was struggling to adapt to the rise in smartphones. The agency argues that Meta’s acquisition strategy was rooted in the view Zuckerberg encapsulated in a June 2008 internal email: “it is better to buy than compete.”

Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp have remained free to use, which makes it hard to show harm to consumers under a long-standing antitrust doctrine that focuses on raising prices as the key indicator of monopoly power. Instead, the FTC argues that taking out its rivals allowed Facebook to offer its users less privacy and show them more advertisements. Meta argues that the FTC’s measures of lower product quality are insufficient and that it made significant investments to grow the apps.

In November, Boasberg denied Meta’s motion for summary judgment, saying the parties’ arguments so far leave “no clear victor” and that the case “must go to trial.” He indicated that his decision might ultimately hinge on how to define the market Meta competes in and whether the company can show that its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp have meaningfully benefited consumers, even if they were motivated in part by a desire to squelch would-be rivals.

Looming over the trial has been Meta’s effort to persuade Trump to drop or settle the case. The prospect of a presidential intervention has been heightened by his controversial move to assert full control over the FTC.

Historically the agency has functioned independently, having commissioners from both parties and its own mandates from Congress. But in March, Trump dismissed both Democrats from the five-member commission, a move they are suing to block. His administration is pushing for a Supreme Court ruling that would overturn the precedent establishing the FTC’s independence, clearing Trump’s path to decide which cases it should and should not pursue. With the Senate’s approval this week of Mark Meador as a commissioner, the agency has three members, all Republicans.

FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson has been vocal about his interest in reining in tech giants and said this month that he “can’t imagine” Trump ordering him to drop a major antitrust suit. He said, however, that he would “obey lawful orders” from the president.

“If there is a settlement, there will always be doubts about how that settlement came about,” Kovacic said. “That bell cannot be unrung.”

Meanwhile, Boasberg has butted heads with the Trump administration in a high-profile case involving deportations. In a March post on his own Truth Social network, Trump called Boasberg a “Radical Left Lunatic Judge.”

Lee Hepner, senior legal counsel for the anti-monopoly nonprofit American Economic Liberties Project, said he considered it unlikely that Zuckerberg’s lobbying efforts would affect the case.

“This case was initially brought under Trump’s first term, and there is strong bipartisan support for this case to proceed,” he said.