• by Wendy Davis , 3 hours ago

Meta is urging a federal appeals court to reject the Federal Trade Commission's effort to revive charges that the company violated antitrust law by monopolizing a market for "personal social networking services."

U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg in Washington, D.C. dismissed the FTC's case last year after trial, ruling that Meta isn't a monopoly because it currently competes with YouTube and TikTok.

Meta says in papers filed late Thursday with the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals that Boasberg's ruling was supported by documents and testimony presented at trial.

"Empirical evidence demonstrated that 'people treat TikTok and YouTube as substitutes for Facebook and Instagram, and the amount of competitive overlap is economically important,'" Meta argues, quoting directly from Boasberg's ruling.

The tech platform's papers come in litigation dating to December 2020, when the FTC claimed that Meta's acquisition of Instagram (purchased for $1 billion in 2012) and WhatsApp (bought for $19 billion in 2014) enabled the company to maintain a monopoly.

Boasberg said in a ruling dismissing the case that the social media landscape "changed markedly" since the FTC filed suit, noting TikTok's emergence as a rival.

The FTC recently asked the appellate court to reverse that decision. Among other arguments, the agency contends that TikTok "does not meaningfully serve the demand for friends-and-family sharing," and that Meta "comfortably maintained its vise grip on that market."

Meta says the trial evidence doesn't support the FTC's argument on that point. The company writes in its appellate brief that "Reels" videos are now the most popular feature on Facebook and Instagram, and that "almost none" of that material is from users' friends.

"By any accounting, content posted by friends has become a small fraction of the content that users see on Facebook and Instagram -- less than 15% of posts in Facebook’s news feed and 5% on Instagram’s feed," the platform writes.

The FTC also argued in its recent appellate brief that the Sherman Antitrust Act only required the agency to prove Meta monopolized a market in 2020, when the case was filed.

Meta essentially counters that even if the FTC had proven Meta was a monopoly six years ago, the agency wouldn't be entitled to obtain a remedy now, unless Meta was currently a monopoly.

"The FTC claims that, by acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp, Meta gained a monopoly; but the district court found that Meta has no monopoly today," Meta writes. "Even on the unproven assumption that competition was ever impaired, the court found that competition has been restored."

The appellate court hasn't yet said when it will hear oral arguments in the matter.