What to Know About the Meta Trial as Judge Weighs Decision
ICLE President Geoffrey A. Manne is quoted in this The Hill article discussing the FTC’s antitrust case against Meta over its alleged social networking monopoly through Facebook and Instagram. Read the full article here.
U.S. District Judge James Boasberg has seemed skeptical of the FTC’s proposed market, noted Geoffrey Manne, president and founder of the International Center for Law & Economics.
“The judge has expressed some reservations about the way the FTC is trying to demonstrate its market definition, but obviously the underlying issue is monopoly power,” Manne told The Hill.
“It’s always a little bit risky to infer a specific point of view from questions that are posed or comments that are made in the courtroom, but it seems to me that the judge still has doubts about the delineation of the relevant market, and the FTC has to defend its definition or the case founders,” he continued.
“It’s a really tough case in this regard because … there seems to be no qualitative evidence that’s really going to answer the question,” he added.
Because most social media platforms are free, it’s not possible to identify Meta’s competitors using price data, as antitrust cases often do, Manne noted.
This results in a “highly speculative world” that relies heavily on Meta’s intent at the time, Manne said.
“You have an entity like Instagram that may or may not have been in any way successful, that may or may not have evolved in a way to actually be a challenge to Facebook, that may or may not have evolved in any way to become bigger than it was when Facebook bought it,” he told The Hill.
“It’s never going to be dispositive, and I guess I’m afraid, from the FTC perspective, that they don’t have a lot more than that,” he added.
The FTC has presented numerous emails and messages from Meta executives, including Zuckerberg, suggesting they had real concerns about Instagram and WhatsApp becoming threats to Facebook prior to the acquisition.