This is a major victory for Mark Zuckerberg: on Tuesday, November 18, American federal judge James Boasberg ruled in favor of the Meta group in an antitrust trial that pitted them against the competition authority, the FTC, over the acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp. Antitrust authorities failed to prove that Meta was in a dominant and monopolistic position, the judge ruled. Therefore, Facebook’s parent company does not need to sell Instagram or WhatsApp, as the FTC has requested.
In this trial held over several weeks in April and May, the FTC argued that the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, carried out in 2012 and then in 2014, were aimed at eliminating the risk of competition with Facebook and thus maintaining a quasi-monopoly in these markets.
FTC “continues to assert that Meta is competing with the same old competitors as it was ten years ago and that the company has a monopoly over it (A) it is limited in scope and maintains its monopoly through anti-competitive acquisitionsjudge’s estimate. Regardless of whether Meta has held monopoly power in the past or not, the FTC must prove that this is still the case. He failed to do so. »
You have 40.96% of this article left to read. The remainder is provided to customers.
