Meta is facing one of the biggest challenges the U.S. government has brought against a tech company in decades, as court rules lawsuit aiming to break up Meta go ahead.
Backstory🔙 The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) saw its first complaint against Meta dismissed over the summer for its inability to prove that the tech giant was in fact a monopoly (Meta’s platforms have a combined 2.8 billion daily active users). This time around, the court approved the FTC’s revised lawsuit seeking to reverse Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram & WhatsApp.
Why is this Important🤔 But, the dismissal of the first case was a confirmation of how difficult it is to prove that a company is a monopoly when its products are essentially free, like Google, Meta, etc. The judge who dismissed the FTC’s first lawsuit said that “market-share data doesn’t quite settle matters on its own, the FTC also has to show that Facebook’s alleged monopoly has been bad for consumers.”