By Björn Jeffery, SvD Tech Brief. Published in Svenska Dagbladet on 14 April 2025.
Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg is being taken to court as his company’s future hangs in the balance. If he loses, the company could face a forced sale worth billions.
On Monday, the trial begins that could change social media forever.
The American competition authority FTC is accusing Meta — Facebook’s parent company — of running a monopoly. The case centres in particular on the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, and what the real motives behind them were. If the FTC prevails, Meta could be forced to break itself up — and initiate a forced sale of certain parts of the business. The social media market would then change enormously.
Meta contends that it has competed hard but fairly through its acquisitions, and points to the fact that the market has changed significantly since the purchases took place. Instagram was acquired in 2012, when it was a small but promising photo app. WhatsApp was acquired in 2014. Since then, TikTok has become a strong competitor, as have YouTube and Snap.
The trial is the result of an investigation that has been under way for almost six years. Right up until the last moment Meta tried to avoid the courtroom — including through direct lobbying of President Donald Trump. Those efforts were unsuccessful, and now Zuckerberg and a number of other executives are being called to testify in a process expected to last between six and eight weeks.
The central question the FTC is pursuing is hypothetical: would Meta be as dominant today if it had not bought Instagram and WhatsApp? The FTC argues the answer is no, but the challenge for them lies in proving it. To do so they are drawing, among other things, on internal emails that emerged during the investigation. In 2008, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote that “it is better to buy than to compete.” In 2013, a senior technology executive at the company wrote that “personally I think companies like WhatsApp are the biggest threat to Facebook.”
The approach has been called “buy or bury.” In short, it meant that Facebook allowed competitors to use parts of its platform to gain more users or features. But if a competitor became too successful — to the point of posing a potential threat to Facebook — access to the platform was cut off. The choice for competitors therefore felt like being acquired by Facebook (“buy”) or losing momentum and potentially being shut out (“bury”).
The trial comes at a turning point in American politics where the overlap with technology has never been greater. Elon Musk is cleaning up public finances while simultaneously selling electric cars and launching rockets, and the list of tech CEOs who appeared on stage at Trump’s inauguration was long. For its part, Meta has recently changed its content moderation approach to something more suited to Trump, and has just appointed Dina Powell McCormick — a former Trump adviser — to its board.
Given all this, one might imagine that the government agency FTC would be more sympathetic towards tech giant Meta’s strategy and methods. But the investigation began during Trump’s first presidential term, when he had a considerably more sceptical attitude towards “Big Tech” and Meta in particular. More than anything else, however, the new FTC chief, Andrew Ferguson, has a different view of how fair competition in business should be achieved.
In an interview with Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast, Ferguson described his position as follows:
“If we really vigorously enforce the competition laws, we avoid the need for regulation.”
Fewer laws regulating what companies can do, in other words. But that presupposes the playing field was fair to begin with. And that is precisely what the FTC is alleging it was not. The point is that genuine competition cannot emerge when the market has already started on an unequal footing.
Meta now faces several weeks of questioning. Former senior executives including Sheryl Sandberg are being called in to account for how decisions were made during her time at the company. Meta has a strong position given that it will be difficult for the FTC to prove hypothetical scenarios.
Meta has an additional strong argument on its side: should acquisitions ever be considered truly final? The purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp were made 13 and 11 years ago respectively, and went through the standard regulatory review process at the time. If that outcome can be reversed at any point — even more than a decade later — there is a risk that no one will dare to complete any business deals at all.
