FTC: Metas take over from WhatsApp and Instagram

The US trade supervision, Federal Trade Commission (FTC), examines whether Meta holds a monopoly. It is about whether the takeovers of WhatsApp and Instagram were lawful. The competitive authority’s lawsuit was admitted, and the negotiation starts on Monday.

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

Acceptance was at the expense of the users

Specifically, the FTC says that the takeover was not legal and should never have been allowed. It was “killer aquisitions” that would have prevented competition. In addition, the quality of the services even dropped after the takeover. There was more advertising and privacy protection was softened. The reasoning corresponds to the concept of “Enshittification” created by Cory Doctorow, with whom he thinks that platforms would be more and more accommodated over time and size the interests of investors and thus and worse for end users.

The FTC complaint is with the district judge James Boasberg in Washington. Meta has connected its services together for years, making functions available across the board. For example, Meta AI is available in WhatsApp, the Facebook Messenger and Instagram. In the EU, for example, the internal linking of the user data is not always allowed. Since the acquisitions were once allowed by the authorities, the question also arises as to what it means if the permission is questioned years later. Meta also criticizes this sharply. The company also relies on the fact that the acquisitions would have approved competition and would benefit consumers.

The lawsuit originally comes from the first reign of Donald Trump. Now there is a process in his second term. In the meantime, Tiktok grew up, Elon Musk has taken over Twitter and made it X – both can be seen as a competition with metas. The lawsuit also speaks of Snapchat and, long since become irrelevant, platforms such as MySpace. In addition, there are now numerous smaller alternatives, such as Bluesky and Mastodon.

Trump and the tech companies

Mark Zuckerberg recently lubricated Trump honey for the mail. It wasn’t long ago that Trump Zuckerberg threatened with the prison and described him as an enemy. He was more dangerous than China. Now the two met several times in Trump’s estate in Mar-A-Lago in Florida. Since then, Zuckerberg, as well as other tech entrepreneurs, has donated a lot of money for Trump’s inauguration, fact checks have been abolished in the United States, and also a lot of moderation guidelines that were to protect minorities, among other things. Zuckerberg names the Chatbot Grok by Elon Musk as a model for its own AI models, which also has few safety measures with very few guardrails. For this, Meta’s latest AI model Llama 4 is said to have balanced answers-and less politically left.

It is unclear whether and how much influence Trump has on the result of this procedure. This also applies to the monopoly lawsuit that looks towards Google. In this case it has already been found that Google holds a monopoly, and this lawsuit also comes from Trump’s first term. Now it is negotiated whether the business with the Chrome browser has to be split off. The US judicial authority complains.