> "The FTC's lawsuit against Meta defies reality. The evidence at trial will show what every 17-year-old in the world knows: Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp compete with Chinese-owned TikTok, YouTube, X, iMessage and many others," Meta spokesperson Chris Sgro said in a statement.

Everyone knew at the time that Facebook bought Instagram because it threatened Facebook's dominance, and hindsight shows that exactly that happened. There's a huge swath of people that dropped off FB and now use Insta, but Meta owns both. It was a great move but it was absolutely anti-competitive at the time.

Other articles posted about this:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/technology/meta-antitrust... (https://archive.ph/8wOPP)

https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/14/media/meta-ftc-trial/index.ht...

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/13/meta-zuckerberg-ftc...

(I've omitted the HN links this time because there weren't any comments yet. Someday we're going to do proper URL bundling and karma sharing for cases like this, where multiple submitters post good articles on the same underlying story.)

I don't understand the FTC's strategy here. Their entire case hinges on the fact that the judge will accept that Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat and MeWe (?) are direct competitors of Facebook in the "personal social networking" space while TikTok, YouTube, X, iMessage and all the rest aren't. Unsurprisingly that is what Meta's legal team is spending all of its efforts debating. I really can't see the judge allowing such a cherry-picked definition of what Facebook's market is.

As someone who’s stuck with Whatsapp and no way out (friends and family won’t switch), I dearly hope for a split.

I do struggle to understand how we here casually lump tohether totally different platforms as comptetitors.

It’s not like I can use Youtube or Tiktok instead of Whatsapp with my family for direct and group discussion. Even X and Instagram would be a stretch, as their raison d’être is public social media and not instant messaging.

Sure the platforms have overlapping features, but you ain’t gonna use a knife insted of a spoon.

> Meta could have chosen to compete with then-upstart photo sharing app Instagram in 2012, a senior FTC official said on a call with reporters ahead of the trial, but instead it bought it, and did the same with WhatsApp.

This has a potentially very-chilling effect on acquisitions, which are a major source of liquidity for lots of secondary companies.