WASHINGTON, DC – JULY 09: The Federal Trade Commission entrance is seen on July 09, 2025 in Washington, DC. (Leigh Vogel/Getty Images for Ian Madrigal)
Leigh Vogel/Getty Images for Ian Madrigal
To bolster its appeal of a previously dismissed antitrust lawsuit against Meta, the FTC is looking far back to a deeply unrecognizable commercial past. The problem for the FTC is that it’s not just the present that wholly discredits the FTC’s case, and its appeal.
For background, it was in 2012 and 2014 that Facebook purchased Instagram and WhatsApp for $1 billion and $19 billion respectively. In its appeal, the FTC charges “that for over a decade Meta has illegally maintained a monopoly in personal social networking services through anticompetitive conduct – by buying the significant competitive threats it identified in Instagram and WhatsApp.” The charge itself discredits the revival of an already-dismissed lawsuit.
To see why, simply consider the $20 billion expended to make the purchases that presently have the FTC so up in arms. $20 billion to acquire monopoly power? Crucial here is that the markets confirm the flippancy found in the previous question, and much more importantly, would have confirmed it then if anyone had been asking.
It’s not just that Facebook paid a relatively slim $1 billion for Instagram (a screaming sign that it was buying many things in 2012, none of them a monopoly), it’s that Facebook’s shares declined following the acquisition. What was true about Instagram was similarly true for WhatsApp.
It’s a reminder that it wasn’t just investors who were less than enthused by Facebook’s allegedly offending acquisitions. Neither was the FTC taken aback. Why would it have been? Investors saw many things in the purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp, but as the price action of Facebook’s shares once again confirms, “monopoly” status never passed the lips of investors or antitrust officials at the FTC.
Fast forward to the present, and 2026 specifically, it’s essential to point out that in 2025 Meta spent over $70 billion on data centers alone. Please stop and consider the expenditures with the FTC’s appeal in mind. It’s no insight to point out that a corporation with monopoly power wouldn’t and couldn’t put such a substantial amount of money to work.
The wouldn’t part is informed by the simple truth that “monopolies” don’t need to expend enormous sums to protect a business that, for being a monopoly, experiences no competition. Which explains couldn’t: if Meta had ever been a monopoly, there’s no way its shareholders would have ever allowed $70 billion in new spending meant to expand an already impregnable moat.
All of which speaks to how very much the FTC’s initial 2020 lawsuit, along with the 2026 appeal of its dismissal, were and are a look backwards. In appealing in 2026, it’s as though antitrust officials are blind not just to a constantly evolving social media sector, but also to what happened on November 30, 2022. It almost wastes words to point out that the technology sector was profoundly changed by the rollout of ChatGPT, so much so that the leading lights of technology have spent hundreds of billions since November 30, 2022 in a feverish effort to discover a present and future of technology that won’t remotely look like the past.
Which is just a comment that weak as the FTC’s case was in 2020, its appeal of what the courts dismissed is exponentially weaker in 2026. See ChatGPT and what’s followed it, including gargantuan amounts of spending by Meta and others. It seems they know more than any of us that they’re many things, none of them a “monopoly.”