A US district court judge on November 18 issued a ruling dismissing the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) antitrust lawsuit against social networking giant Meta.
In his ruling, Judge James Boasberg said the FTC failed to prove that Meta acquired Instagram and WhatsApp with the intent of eliminating competitors in the social media market.
The FTC previously sought to force Meta to divest both Instagram and WhatsApp, even though the commission approved those acquisitions in 2012 and 2014, respectively.
Judge Boasberg found that the government 's lawyers had argued unconvincingly that Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat constituted a so-called private social media market.
Instead, the judge accepted Meta's argument that even if such a private social media market ever existed, it no longer does, and the company now has to compete with larger rivals like TikTok and Google's YouTube.
In his ruling, Mr. Boasberg wrote that given the constant rise and fall of apps, chasing fads and adding new features year after year, it was understandable why the FTC had difficulty determining the boundaries of Meta’s product market.
The judge added that despite this, the FTC has maintained that Meta has competed only with its old rivals for the past decade, that the company holds a monopoly in that small group and maintains it through anticompetitive acquisitions.
However, he stressed that regardless of whether Meta held monopoly power in the past, the FTC must prove that the company still holds that power today.
With this ruling, Meta has avoided the risk of losing Instagram - one of the most important sources of revenue to help them compete better with TikTok, and this "giant" is also not forced to separate from WhatsApp, one of the world's leading messaging apps./.
Source: https://www.vietnamplus.vn/meta-thang-kien-bao-toan-mo-vang-instagram-va-whatsapp-post1077850.vnp
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