Federal judge says Meta is not a monopoly, ending FTC’s long-running antitrust case against the social media company

Judge Boasberg's decision¹ is the latest development in the ongoing efforts by the FTC and Department of Justice Antitrust Division (DOJ) to use the antitrust laws to challenge the dominance of Big Tech companies in the United States.  To date, these efforts have brought mixed results and raised questions by legislators as to whether the U.S. antitrust laws are adequately equipped to address the alleged competition concerns the agencies deem to be prevalent in the dynamic and rapidly changing U.S. technology markets. 

Lengthy litigation timeline collides with rapidly evolving social media market to sink FTC's monopolization case against Meta

The FTC filed its initial lawsuit against Meta in December 2020 at the end of the first Trump administration. An amended complaint² was filed by the agency in August 2021 under the leadership of former Democratic FTC Chair Lina Khan, a show of bipartisan support for increased antitrust enforcement against Big Tech. In the amended complaint, the FTC alleged that Meta violated Section 2 of the Sherman Act by holding a monopoly in the market for personal social networking (PSN) in the United States, which it allegedly maintained illegally through “high barriers to entry, including strong network effects” as well as “by buying up new innovators that were succeeding where Facebook failed.”³ Specifically, the complaint highlights Meta's purchases of social media platform Instagram in 2010 and messaging service WhatsApp in 2014 as examples of such anticompetitive acquisitions.

At trial this past spring, the FTC argued that Meta's large profit margin, the purportedly degraded quality of Meta's products, and the increasingly negative sentiment about the company from its users is evidence of Meta's monopoly power.  In his November 19 opinion, Judge Boesberg found this evidence unconvincing in demonstrating Meta's monopoly power, finding that: (1) the FTC failed to foreclose the possibility that Meta's “handsome profits” could be attributed to factors such as technological advancements in targeted advertising and/or the company's successful investments in research and development initiatives; (2) evidence shows that Meta's apps have continuously improved, and have not degraded over time; and (3) falling user sentiment about Meta reflects the increasingly negative tone of news coverage, and does not necessarily demonstrate that the company's products are worsening.⁴ The court rejected the notion that consumers would prefer the versions of Instagram and Facebook that existed a decade ago to the versions that exist today, citing the changing nature of how users engage with the platforms and the company's innovation in response to evolving customer preferences.⁵

The court also rejected the FTC's attempts to prove that Meta holds a dominant share of the market that is protected by barriers to entry.  Specifically, the court rejected the FTC's attempt to limit the relevant marked to PSN, and found that empirical evidence “resoundingly” shows that consumers treat apps such as TikTok and YouTube as substitutes for Facebook and Instagram, and that while “[personal social networking] apps may have been a market unto themselves when the FTC filed its case in 2020, or when it approved Facebook's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp in 2012 and 2014 . . . [that] is no longer the case.”⁶ The court explained this evolution as “a shift from [social media] feeds full of friends' posts” to ones dominated by “short unconnected videos recommended by AI then multiplied to dominate users' feeds”⁷, and concluded that the “dominant way that people use Meta's apps to share with friends is [] therefore the same way they share content from TikTok and YouTube.”⁸ In finding that TikTok and YouTube belong in the same product market as Facebook and Instagram, Judge Boasberg concluded that Meta does not hold a monopoly in the broader market for social media in which it competes.⁹ The court held that, even if Meta enjoyed monopoly power in the past, the FTC failed to show that it “continues to hold such power now.”¹⁰

In a response to the decision, FTC spokesperson Joe Simonson simply offered, without explanation, that [t]he deck was always stacked against us with Judge Boasberg” and cited the politically-motivated articles of impeachment filed against Judge Boesberg earlier this month by Republican Representative Brandon Gill (R-TX).¹¹ Simonson did not indicate in his statement whether  the FTC intends to appeal the decision.     

Meta's win is the most decisive rejection of U.S. antitrust agencies' enforcement efforts against Big Tech

Judge Boasberg’s decision in FTC v. Meta marks the most decisive loss to date by the government in any of the ongoing antitrust enforcement cases filed in recent years by both the FTC and DOJ Antitrust Division against large U.S. tech companies. In two such cases brought by DOJ against Google, courts have accepted DOJ’s arguments that Google maintains illegal monopolies in both the general search services¹² and digital advertising markets.¹³ However, the judge in the Google search case did not adopt the government’s remedies proposal that would have forced the company to divest its Chrome or Android products.¹⁴ Closing arguments in the remedies trial in the Google ad tech case in federal court in Virginia concluded in November 2025, and Judge Leonie Brinkema will decide whether to adopt DOJ’s proposed remedy that would require Google to divest some of its ad exchange technology that runs transactions between ad buyers and sellers.

Legislators question adequacy of U.S. antitrust laws to address competition concerns in modern markets

Judge Boasberg's decision against Meta has led to renewed calls by Democratic lawmakers to reevaluate the effectiveness of the U.S. antitrust laws in addressing anticompetitive conduct in modern technology markets.  On November 19, 2025, the Chairs of the House Monopoly Busters Caucus¹⁵ issued a statement calling Judge Boasberg's decision “wrong and dangerous” and a “judicial rubber stamp for unchecked monopoly power.”  The statement also stressed the need for Congress to “modernize the law before a single company controls both today's conversations and tomorrow's minds.”  In addition, Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar—who has proposed legislation to modernize the U.S. antitrust laws —said in a November 18 statement that she disagrees with Judge Boasberg's ruling, and that the “court's opinion makes clear that our laws are not keeping pace with advances in technology and that we must pass legislation to take on tech monopolists and return competition to digital markets . . .”

Looking ahead

The outcome in this case highlights the difficulty of defining static product markets in dynamic technology industries, which can affect the antitrust agencies' ability to challenge tech mergers and police conduct by technology companies. The FTC will have another bite at the apple when trial begins in its monopolization case against another Big Tech company in early 2027 in federal court in Washington State.

Authored by Logan Breed and Jill Ottenberg.