Meta goes to trial to avoid a breakup of Instagram and WhatsApp | The Verge

On Monday, Meta will face the Federal Trade Commission in a legal fight that could reshape the social media landscape.Over the next two months, the US government will make its case that the company’s 2012 acquisition of Instagram and 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp squashed potential threats to its dominance. Meta, which went by the name of Facebook at the time, will defend itself by arguing that it helped grow those acquisitions into large businesses used by billions of people while facing plenty of competition along the way. The company’s senior executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg and former COO Sheryl Sandberg, are expected to testify during the trial in Washington, DC. The trial itself has been a long time coming. It’s based on a lawsuit filed under the first Trump administration and then amended under the Biden administration, seeking solutions as dramatic as unwinding Meta’s big mergers. It’s the third US trial attempting to bust up Big Tech in two years, following the Justice Department’s successful case against Google’s search business and a second one pending a decision against its ad tech business. It kicks off amid a broad rethinking of how antitrust laws should apply to digital markets, which started
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