On November 18, 2025, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia entered judgment for Meta Platforms, Inc. (“Meta”), denying the Federal Trade Commission’s (“FTC”) request for a permanent injunction, holding that the agency failed to prove Meta currently holds monopoly power in the FTC’s alleged relevant product market.
Plaintiff, the FTC, alleged that defendant, Meta, monopolized a distinct market for “personal social networking” (PSN) services in the United States and maintained that power through acquisitions, such as Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, and other conduct, in violation of Section 2 of the Sherman Act. Plaintiff alleged the PSN market contains only four apps: Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and MeWe. Defendant countered that PSN is not a coherent market in light of convergence across social-media platforms, especially as of the last few years. Instead, defendant argued, it competes broadly in “social media,” where TikTok and YouTube are close substitutes that significantly constrain them.
As such, the threshold issue in the case was defining the relevant product market. Applying the hypothetical monopolist framework to zero-priced digital products, the Court asked whether a firm controlling Facebook and Instagram could profitably impose a small but significant nontransitory increase in the “quality-adjusted price” (e.g., higher ad load or degraded features) and relied on real-world substitution evidence to answer that question. The Court concluded that TikTok and YouTube, at a minimum, belong in the same product market because consumers reallocate substantial time among these apps, as demonstrated by observational data, a randomized payment experiment, natural experiments (such as Meta outages, a YouTube outage, India’s TikTok ban, and the brief U.S. TikTok shutdown), and industry materials treating the platforms as competitors.
Additionally, the Court found that qualitative factors further corroborated a broader single social-media market: features across Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are now virtually indistinguishable as creators cross-post identical short videos; firms build with similar inputs (content libraries and recommendation algorithms); customers are largely overlapping; and price is uniformly zero. The Court rejected plaintiff’s “Whole Foods core customers” theory—an analogy to the Whole Foods and Wild Oats merger challenge in which the FTC argued that a firm can define a market narrowly around its most loyal “core” customers and price-discriminate against them—finding no evidence here of a significant core customer base attracted to Meta’s friend connection features (e.g., friend requests and friend posted content).
With a broader market definition established, to obtain a permanent injunction, plaintiff had to prove that defendant currently has monopoly power in that market—not in December 2020 when the complaint was filed. Plaintiff was unsuccessful in doing so. Defendant’s share of time spent in the broader social-media market was well below traditional thresholds for inferring monopoly power, and erosion from TikTok’s growth further undercut any claim of durable dominance.
Furthermore, the Court rejected plaintiff’s evidence of monopoly power. It treated defendant’s high profits as consistent with its efficiency, successful ad technology, and risky investments
rather than monopoly rents. Additionally, defendant’s “quality-adjusted price” had not increased given continued substantial feature improvements and its individualized ad load reflected commonplace price discrimination indicative of some market power but not monopoly power.
Based on the evidence put forth by the parties, the Court found the relevant market, at a minimum, included TikTok and YouTube, and found that defendant does not presently possess monopoly power in the properly defined market as defendant’s share is presently well below levels that support monopoly-power inferences. Plaintiff’s request for injunctive relief was therefore denied.
