How Trump’s TikTok Tactics Helped Meta Win Antitrust Case

For once, the latest multibillion-dollar AI deal—this time Microsoft and Nvidia investing in Anthropic—isn’t the day’s biggest tech news development. (Skip down for details on that story.) More important was a Washington judge’s ruling on Tuesday that Meta Platforms isn’t a monopoly. So much for all those breathless headlines suggesting Meta might get broken up! The ruling was good news for CEO Mark Zuckerberg, even interrupting a big sell-off in Meta stock—for a few hours, as Meta shares ended slightly down for the day. 

The ruling is also the first big loss for the federal government in its latest spate of antitrust cases against big tech, although its victory against Google hasn’t led to any meaningful penalties against that tech giant so far. (The Apple and Amazon cases are still to be tried.) But at least the Justice Department got to first base with the Google search and ad tech lawsuits, winning findings that Google had monopolies in both businesses. In the Meta case, the judge demolished the Federal Trade Commission’s arguments piece by piece. The case, originally brought in late 2020 by the first Trump administration and then carried on by the Biden administration, focused heavily on Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp in 2012 and 2014, respectively. The FTC’s argument was that Meta—then called Facebook—had bought both companies to try to crush nascent competitors. That subject occupied a lot of time in the trial this past spring but proved largely irrelevant to Judge James Boasberg.