Meta: Monopoly lawsuit over WhatsApp and Instagram starts in the USA

The US trade regulator, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), is investigating whether Meta has a monopoly. The question is whether the takeovers of WhatsApp and Instagram were legal. The competition authority's complaint has been admitted and the trial starts on Monday.

Meta, then still Facebook, first took over the up-and-coming messenger WhatsApp in 2012, followed by the purchase of Instagram – in 2014, also at a time when the photo platform was still quite young and only just becoming increasingly popular. According to the FTC, the problem was that Meta simply took over potential competitors. A practice that seems to be common in Silicon Valley. In the case of social media, this led to a monopoly on Meta's part.

Takeovers were at the expense of users

Specifically, the FTC says that the takeover was not legal and should never have been allowed. They were "killer acquisitions" that prevented competition. In addition, the quality of the services even declined after the takeover. There had been noticeably more advertising and privacy protection had been weakened. The argumentation thus corresponds to the term "enshittification" created by Cory Doctorow, by which he means that platforms become more and more accommodating to the interests of investors over time and size and thus worse and worse for end users.

The FTC's lawsuit is before District Judge James Boasberg in Washington. Meta has been connecting its services for years, making functions available across the board. For example, Meta AI is available in WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger and Instagram. In the EU, for example, the internal linking of user data is not always permitted. As the takeovers were once permitted by the authorities, the question also arises as to what it means when permission is questioned years later. Meta also sharply criticizes this. The company also argues that the takeovers allowed competition and benefited consumers.

The lawsuit originally dates back to Donald Trump's first term in office. It is now being brought in his second term of office. In the meantime, Tiktok has grown up, Elon Musk has taken over Twitter and turned it into X –, both of which can be seen as competition to Meta's services. The lawsuit also mentions Snapchat and platforms that have long since become irrelevant, such as MySpace. There are now also numerous smaller alternatives, such as Bluesky and Mastodon.

Trump and the tech companies

Mark Zuckerberg has recently tended to butter up Trump. Not long ago, Trump threatened Zuckerberg with prison and described him as an enemy. He was more dangerous than China. Now the two have met several times at Trump's estate in Mar-a-Lago in Florida. Since then, Zuckerberg and other tech entrepreneurs have donated a lot of money to Trump's inauguration, fact-checkers have been abolished in the USA, as have a number of moderation guidelines that were intended to protect minorities, among other things. Zuckerberg cites Elon Musk's chatbot Grok as a model for his own AI models, which also has very few safety measures with very few guard rails. However, Meta's latest AI model, Llama 4, is supposed to provide more balanced answers – and less politically left-wing.

Whether and how much influence Trump has on the outcome of this process is unclear. This also applies to the monopoly lawsuit that Google is facing. In this case, it has already been established that Google has a monopoly; this lawsuit also dates back to Trump's first term in office. Now it is being negotiated whether the Chrome browser business must be spun off. The US Department of Justice is suing.

(emw)