On November 18, 2025, the court overseeing the Federal Trade Commission’s case against Meta rejected the FTC’s claim accusing Meta of unlawfully preserving its monopoly by acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp.[1] In a decision focused on the rapid evolution of the social-media industry, the D.C. district court ruled that the FTC failed to prove that Meta currently possesses monopoly power in an alleged “Personal Social Networking” market, and the agency’s claims therefore fail.
Central to the court’s ruling is its conception of the FTC’s enforcement authority. According to the court, the FTC’s statutory authority under Section 13(b) extends only to ongoing and imminent violations. In the court’s view, past monopolization—even assuming it occurred—cannot support injunctive relief. Therefore, even if Meta held a monopoly when it purchased Instagram, it does not matter: if circumstances have changed and today’s competitive landscape no longer reflects monopoly power, the FTC cannot prevail.
Circumstances, the court emphasized, have changed dramatically. The opinion extensively reviews the evolution of the social-media industry—including TikTok’s arrival in 2018, Meta’s shift toward video-based content, and consumers’ changing habits. According to the court, these events have remade the social media landscape, giving social media users alternatives to Facebook and Instagram, and undermining the claim that Meta still has monopoly power.
Complicating the inquiry is the fact that Meta and others do not charge users to access their apps, which forced the parties and the court to rely on an indirect or quality-adjusted measure of pricing. For example, the court examined whether increasing ad load effectively “raised” the price of Facebook and Instagram, and whether users would switch to alternatives if Meta began charging for access. These questions took on heightened significance because traditional price-based approaches provide little traction in zero-price markets.
Ultimately, the court held that the FTC did not demonstrate Meta’s monopoly power—either through direct evidence from the market or through market share analysis. It rejected the FTC’s proposed “Personal Social Networking” market, which centered on features facilitating connections among friends and family. In the court’s view, the relevant market must include TikTok (and to a lesser degree, YouTube), and once those apps are included, Meta’s share falls well short of monopoly levels. The court, at bottom, relied on evidence of substitution—for example, evidence showing that Meta’s users switch to TikTok when they cannot access Facebook or Instagram—concluding that these other apps belong in the same market.
This rationale—that TikTok and YouTube are in the relevant market because users give them attention as a substitute for Meta’s apps—harkens back to the court’s 2024 summary judgment decision in the same case. There, the court rejected Meta’s argument that Facebook and Instagram operate in a broadly defined market of products that compete for users’ “time and attention.” The court criticized Meta’s “proposed ‘time and attention’ market” because it had “no obvious limiting principle: when it comes to so broad a market as ‘time and attention,’ Meta competes not just with YouTube, TikTok, and X, but also with watching a movie at a friend’s house, reading a book at the library, and playing online poker.”[2] In other words, there must be a basis to include a potential competing app in the relevant market other than simply being a substitute for killing time.
Against that backdrop, the court’s recent emphasis on attention raises questions. If time and attention are not the appropriate barometers of substitutability, what is the basis for selecting TikTok and YouTube as potential substitutes? What is the difference between YouTube and another ad-based streaming app, say, Tubi? If “time and attention” are insufficient metrics of substitutability, the opinion leaves only a partial explanation of why TikTok and YouTube—but not other attention-gathering platforms—belong in the relevant market and raises substantial questions regarding the ability of traditional market definition tools to evaluate zero-price markets.
One thing is clear from the court’s decision: Meta has won decisively. Beyond that, the decision offers important insights—and raises difficult questions—for courts and antitrust practitioners: How should market definition work when a product is free? What evidence of “price” or “quality” can meaningfully demonstrate monopoly power? And, as digital services converge in format and functionality, what principles should guide the line between legitimate competitive substitution and overbroad “attention markets”?
The Meta decision offers some answers, but it also signals that the law in zero-price markets has room to grow—and that future cases may turn on careful empirical analysis of how consumers actually use today’s rapidly changing platforms.
[1] FTC v. Meta Platforms, Inc., No. 20-3590, ECF No. 693 (D.D.C. Nov. 18, 2025).
[2] FTC v. Meta Platforms, Inc., 775 F. Supp. 3d 16, 43 (D.D.C. 2024).
