“Meta’s goal is to get users to spend as much time on its apps as possible, and it tunes its algorithms to show users the content they most want to see.” - Judge James ‘Jeb’ Boasberg

The most telling moment of a long-running Facebook antitrust case occurred in May, when it came out in the courtroom that the company’s algorithm had recommended millions of children’s Instagram accounts to a set of users it internally called “groomers.” One would think that a public expose of Mark Zuckerberg potentially facilitating pedophilia on a mass scale would have become a scandal, discussed by QAnon and a public obsessed with the Epstein files. But it didn’t. A few outlets reported it. And the judge in the case, James “Jeb” Boasberg, an Obama appointee in the D.C. district court, far from finding something of interest, was annoyed and bored by the revelation. Boasberg told the government to move along and stop wasting his time with such trivialities.

After years of anger at the social media company, no one, it seemed, cared anymore, even about pretty appalling stuff.

So it wasn’t a surprise that a few days ago, Boasberg ruled for Meta and against the Federal Trade Commission in the case. This ruling didn’t make much of a ripple in the press, or even the antitrust-focused world. I focus on the problem of market power, Meta once hired opposition researchers to go after my group personally, and even I had a hard time caring that much.

Why the apathy? To answer that question, you have to look to another event that happened that same day Boasberg handed down his ruling. President Donald Trump called for Congress to ban all AI regulation by states, which would clear the way for large tech firms such as Meta to organize huge swaths of American life unencumbered by public rules. He is going to try to insert this provision in an upcoming defense bill, and potentially in executive orders. And that provision did actually generate public notice and anger.

These two legal events are linked, and suggest that it’s not so much that the public doesn’t want something done about Meta, just that they rightfully came to understand years ago that this particular lawsuit wasn’t going to amount to anything. To understand where we are, I’m going to lay out what happened in the antitrust case, and why it matters.

The basics of what the judge decided are worth understanding, but it is less meaningful than the larger context of the increasing economic importance of generative AI which Trump demonstrated with his attempt to shield the company from public control. In a sense, big tech used to be about a rogue monopoly engaging in extractive behavior, which was when the antitrust suit was brought. Today, it has morphed into a macro problem jeopardizing our economy, and it’s become clear that antitrust isn’t nearly enough to tame it.

Let’s begin with why this monopolization case started out with a bang, but gradually lost steam. From 2017-2023, there was a good deal of political heat on Meta, with public reporting, Congressional investigations, private consumer protection and privacy lawsuits, allegations of mass censorship, a merger challenge, and a host of legislative proposals around protecting kids and data. In the middle of this period, in 2020, Trump FTC Chair Joe Simons and a group of states filed the antitrust case Boasberg ruled on yesterday.

The FTC argued the following in its claim. Meta monopolized the “personal social networking” market, a set of products that help people connect to friends and family through public displays of comments and pictures. Meta did this by buying potential rivals Instagram and WhatsApp so as to prevent them from turning into competitors. This scheme was obvious, Zuckerberg at one point sent an email saying, “it is better to buy than compete.” And his correspondence is rife with similar confessionary statements. In addition, Meta blocked rivals from interconnecting through the company’s application programming interfaces (APIs), with the explicit goal of stopping anyone from getting access to our names and connections, known as the “social graph.” Here too, Zuckerberg explicitly noted he was trying to kill rivals, like the pre-TikTok video sharing service Vine.

So what was the harm? The FTC argued the quality of social networking declined, in the form of higher ad loads, excessive surveillance, poor customer service, and a worse feature set.

But the case, while it had good legal merits, didn’t connect to what most people dislike about Facebook. And that is, it’s really big and powerful, and Mark Zuckerberg acts as a callous power-hungry actor to addict kids, extract from small business, and play around in politics. Antitrust trials are morality stories as much as they are contests of law. And the FTC, faced with a hostile judiciary, couldn’t fit a morality story into its case, so the trial became a fight over technical details. And then Judge Boasberg, by dragging it out for five years, ensured the public would lose interest.

Meta’s response to the technical claims of the FTC was simple. Their lawyers claimed that in 2025, it’s just not a monopolist. In 2018, TikTok came into the U.S. social media market, and did very well. YouTube shorts also became a potent video service. Zuckerberg pivoted to emulate its rivals. Today, Facebook users spend just 17% of their time on the site looking at content from friends. Mostly, people use Facebook and Instagram to watch videos provided by an algorithm. Facebook, therefore, can’t be a monopolist, as it has strong competition. There is no “personal social networking” market, there’s only social media.

Judge Boasberg agreed with Meta. Here’s the gist of his thinking.

Like Heraclitus’s river, the rapids of social media rush along so fast that the Court has never even stepped into the same case twice. It considered motions to dismiss in 2021 and 2022, motions for summary judgment in 2024, and a full merits trial this year. Each time it examined Meta’s apps, they had changed. The competitors had, too. The Court’s two Opinions on motions to dismiss did not even mention the word “TikTok.” Today, that app holds center stage as Meta’s fiercest rival.

On first blush, Meta’s frame makes sense. It does seem reasonable to think about Meta in the same market as TikTok. Meta sees TikTok as a competitor, it launched the Instagram feature Reels to copy it explicitly. When Facebook is down, people will open TikTok or YouTube to look at videos, and a lot of it is the same video content with similar addictive algorithms. To put it uncharitably, there are plenty of rivals trying to get you to waste time with AI slop.

Because of this framing problem, no one is surprised by the outcome; Brendan Benedict predicted it on Big Tech on Trial after attending the proceedings, and it was conventional wisdom that the Meta case was the weakest of the big tech antitrust complaints.

But while Meta’s narrative makes sense intuitively, it’s actually not correct. Now, it’s certainly true that people use Meta’s properties to watch influencer videos, but Meta executives know that it still offers the only mechanism to connect with old acquaintances through a ‘social graph.’ That’s why over the last few weeks, Meta has run an ad campaign titled “Home for the Holidays.” The ad is about adults reconnecting with their high school friends over Thanksgiving when returning to their childhood homes as adults, and of course they use Facebook do so. Watch the ad, it’s actually a beautiful campaign.

The truth is, no one else can make the claim Facebook makes in the ad, because no one else has the social graph of users and connections set up. What Zuckerberg has really is a unique offering of social connections. It’s not just high school friends, it’s a whole host of social groups. Famously, cancer support groups that started on Facebook can’t move, because the platform is so sticky. Ultimately, there is a personal social networking market, which is why Meta is advertising itself that way.

It’s also true that there is an AI video market, and Meta is embedded in that one too. But under the law, the fact that Meta competes with TikTok over AI video distribution shouldn’t mitigate its monopoly power in social networking. It’s like a supermarket that’s competing with a gas station; sure they both sell food, you can get chewing gum or a soda at either one. But the supermarket doesn’t sell gas, and the gas station doesn’t sell a basket of weekly foodstuffs to prepare at home.

And let me give you a tangible understanding of the harm. I’m a Facebook user, though I don’t use it often. Yet, when I travel to other cities, I really wish there were a service that would let me see a list of my friends who live there. This kind of travel feature would be trivial to create and it would help foster the connections that built Facebook, it would also be lovely to use in an era oriented around loneliness. Meta wouldn’t even have to build it, it could also allow third parties to do so. So why doesn’t it exist?

That’s simple. Meta doesn’t invest in these kinds of features anymore. And it won’t allow users to control their own data. Facebook has organized its business around running an AI video factory, pushing viral videos onto algorithms to keep people watching so it can sell them ads. It is also the premier harvester of user data outside of Google, which means its ads are much better and more expensive than its rivals. But it really is a monopolist in connecting people with their friends and family; its executives saying they don’t care about that business anymore probably isn’t true, since they are running ads saying the opposite. But it also doesn’t matter. It is a monopolist in that particular market, and therefore antitrust law should apply.

Still, while the FTC sought to prove legally that Meta is a monopolist in personal social networking, that is a very unsatisfying story, and a generalist judge, and normal people, are going to intuitively react badly to it. While I can explain the legal elements, I can’t with a straight face say that Meta has no competitors. And Boasberg highlighted this disjuncture when he pointed out that Meta makes most of its money on the non-monopoly parts of its business. You would think that as its social networking became less important, Facebook would become less profitable. But “as Meta’s apps have become closer substitutes for TikTok and YouTube,” Boasberg noted, “the company’s projected rate of return has only increased.” Legally, this point doesn’t matter. And the FTC could explain, well, lots of people do use both social networking and short form video, so it’s not a fair point.

But as I noted, there was a basic narrative problem in the case. No one really cares that Meta monopolizes a narrow technical market, people just dislike the chokehold Zuckerberg has on our society. I keep going back to an episode of the Odd Lots podcast, where Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway interviewed a fashion company CEO complaining that the cost of acquiring a customer had gone from $13 to $250 over ten years. That’s because of higher prices on Instagram and the inability of any other ad platform to offer comparable results. “One of the things that must be going on in the economy,” Weisenthal said, “is everybody’s margin becoming Facebook’s profits.” JP Morgan’s chief strategist Michael Cemblest has noted that the scale of Big Tech is so important that they are essentially detached from the rest of the U.S. economy.

Yet, this dynamic just didn’t come up in the trial. Part of the reason is because the FTC didn’t have a great analytical framework to show why Meta has such pricing power in advertising. It’s clearly some sort of unique ability to extract data from third parties, combined with the scale and leverage to get around privacy protections imposed by Apple on everyone else.

That’s not really a criticism of the FTC trial team, they were looking for some sort of narrow attempt to make the case look similar to other antitrust cases. But Facebook is obviously a huge monopoly, which is why it’s just so immensely profitable and totally impervious to any reputational hit. Antitrust law is supposed to be flexible, able to address obviously massive problems like Facebook. But today, it’s not.

And that’s where we get to the first part of the problem, which was Boasberg.

Judge Boasberg, and then three higher judges on the D.C. Circuit, have long been skeptical of the case, and not for particularly good reasons. In 2021, Boasberg dismissed all claims filed under Trump, saying the FTC did not prove there was even a market to monopolize. He was more abrasive to the states, creating judge-made law that state AGs had a time limit on antitrust claims, one he deemed they had not met. In 2023, a D.C. appeals court upheld Boasberg, saying that the state case was not “only odd, but old.” Social networking was an industry, said the panel of three judges, that had “innovation with no end in sight.” It’s the perfect example of a judge creating a new rule that makes it harder to hold monopolists accountable, in this case arbitrarily saying that the public has less recourse if the actions of a monopolist are more than ten years old.

In 2021, FTC Chair Lina Khan resurrected the case, refiling a narrower version with more evidence. For five years, the company and the government played litigation games, with Boasberg continually extending the timeline. For a frame of reference, a similarly complex Microsoft trial was filed in 1998, and the trial and decision were completed that same year. While there was a lot of political interest in Facebook, eventually, Boasberg successfully delayed the trial until everyone had given up that it might matter. Finally, in 2025, the case went to trial, under Trump FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson, who is by most accounts a disinterested commission head trying to curry favor with Donald Trump in the hopes he’ll be appointed to the bench as an appeals judge. Not exactly a great setup.

During the trial, Boasberg had a certain corporatist view of the world common enough in the judiciary. Like judges Ana Reyes and Amit Mehta, who oversaw recent antitrust cases, Boasberg seemed to believe that concentrations of wealth carry a positive moral valence. He was slightly offended at the idea that Meta might have engaged in wrongdoing, which is why he was so dismissive of the shocking groomer revelations that came out in the trial.

And how Boasberg wrote his opinion tells us a lot about the politics at work. It’s notable that Boasberg is not a user of social media. And it showed, insofar as his decision reads so oddly. In 2022, Cory Doctorow invented the popular word “enshittification” to describe how the platforms we use become extractive; Boasberg finds that notion baffling, but that’s because he’s one of the few Americans that doesn’t use such platforms. Meta convinced Boasberg that its apps have continually improved, and the consumption of videos via algorithms shows that the public is happy with the product. “They can sift through millions of videos and find the perfect one for her — and it is more likely to interest her than a humdrum update from a friend she knew in high school,” he wrote in his decision.

Legally, Boasberg offered a clever decision holding against the FTC on most factual questions, adopting Chicago School versions of economics and accepting the arguments of Meta executives as clear evidence, while dismissing the views of FTC experts as biased.

When the FTC pointed to internal Meta surveys showing that users increasingly dislike the service, the judge dismissed that reading. Why? “Nobody knows more about these surveys than Curtis Cobb, Meta’s Vice President of Research and administrator of these surveys,” wrote Boasberg. And Cobb said that poor quality surveys are a result of bad news coverage. “The testimony of the people who know these surveys best, Meta’s own internal analysis,” showed that the surveys were noise, not signal. Only someone who hasn’t used Facebook would say something that delusional.

By contrast, Boasberg was hostile to FTC’s economic witness, Scott Hemphill. In 2019, Hemphill, as an economist, thought that Facebook was a dangerous monopoly and said so, working with scholar Tim Wu and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, and encouraging the FTC to bring the suit. This set of activities, to the judge, showed that Hemphill was an advocate, not an expert. “Once Hemphill was brought on, the Court doubts that he weighed the evidence objectively,” claimed Boasberg in accusing Hemphill of bias. “Instead, it was almost as if the FTC had put one of its own lawyers on the stand.”

In other words, Boasberg thought that a Meta executive with a financial incentive to mislead could be trusted, while an advocate who independently saw a problem and sought to champion public involvement, could not. And since Boasberg doesn’t use the service itself, he had no real basis to understand what most Americans have gone through.

There were other absurdities. For instance, Meta has substantial and elevated profits, and has for 15 years. Anyone with experience in business knows that’s an indicia of market power. But Boasberg said, well maybe the company is just “exceptionally well managed.” And further, he criticizes the FTC because it “did not even show that Meta’s profits are greater than other successful tech firms.” If other big tech firms make large profits, then that, to Boasberg, suggests Meta is not a monopoly. But maybe those other big tech firms are themselves monopolies, as JP Morgan’s Cemblest, and most Wall Street analysts know. One way to figure that out, Boasberg might have considered, would be to go down the hall and ask his colleague Judge Mehta why he ruled that Google was just such an illegal monopolist.

But Boasberg didn’t. And therefore “the Court,” he concluded, “struggles to conclude that Meta’s profits are suspiciously high when the FTC has not even proven that they are unusual.” Of course they’re not unusual among the four companies accused of or found to be violating the law! That’s the point!

All that said, there were some significant strategic errors from the first Trump administration, which launched the case. Notably, the FTC did not claim that the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp were illegal under the Clayton Act, but that they were part of a scheme to monopolize the market under the Sherman Act. The standard for challenging mergers under the Clayton Act, even after the fact, is that a merger that “may substantially lessen competition or tend to create a monopoly” is illegal. That’s easier than proving a monopolization scheme under the Sherman Act, because you don’t have to show monopoly.

Why didn’t the FTC choose to bring a case under merger law? I don’t know. Maybe they were embarrassed they had let the mergers happen in the first place. Maybe Trump’s people were incompetent. Maybe they thought the use of the Clayton Act would be legally difficult because it relied on a doctrine called “potential competition.” (It’s not like they were unaware of the claim, the state AGs actually brought the Clayton Act charge before having their case dismissed by Boasberg because of a new rule he invented to help monpolists.) The point is, they didn’t. Another problem is that the Trump FTC brought the case in the D.C. district, which is a court stacked with corporate lawyers as judges.

Still, I’m not surprised, and I’m not even discouraged, by this outcome. It was honestly too late to affect the market. In 2012 and 2014, the Obama FTC enabled Facebook to became the dominant force it is. And then Boasberg’s long five year delay in even allowing the case to come to trial, meant it was a lost cause years earlier. Now, the big tech debate has moved on, with judges and Congress ratifying that just a few firms are going to control most profits in the U.S. economy and will center all U.S. growth around data centers. Big tech is a macro problem, not an antitrust problem anymore.

That said, explaining why the FTC lost is different from believing that it should have lost. It’s good that the FTC brought this case, and the loss, while unfortunate, was inevitable. Antitrust is just not isolated from larger political currents, nor should it be. While we made immense strides in antitrust law, we didn’t win the political argument against oligarchy. Joe Biden instinctively didn’t like big tech but just had no coherent view of the superrich or dominant firms. His chief of staff, Jeff Zients, even served on Facebook’s board, and the number of billionaires in America doubled on his watch.

Trump is worse, which is what his attempt to impose a ban on any state regulation of AI shows. If the FTC had won, and gone through the appeals, Trump would probably have settled the case anyway. Ultimately there is no way, in a Number Go Up society, to address the power of oligarchy through a technocratic approach, which is really what this case was about. It needs politics.

In 2024, voters picked Trump to crack down on the people making our lives worse. He didn’t. Fortunately, a few weeks ago, voters made a decision that they are tired of Trump’s oligarch-friendly policies, and voted for a series of candidates who promised to lower the cost of essentials. Part of that anger is directed at electricity prices, which are interlinked with data centers, Meta, and the generative AI algorithms and features that persuaded Boasberg that Mark Zuckerberg is not a monopolist. That suggests the politics could be shifting.

Of course, there are reasons to be skeptical of such a turn, and I don’t know what the future holds. But it’s always been obvious that big tech is a political problem, and can’t just be settled through legal processes. I’m glad the FTC fought the good fight and brought this case, flawed as it was, and that Boasberg wrote this comically dumb decision. Because ultimately, Americans have to find a way to put people in elected office who will choose to end Mark Zuckerberg’s power as a policy matter. And anything that helps us see that more clearly is useful.

Thanks for reading! Your tips make this newsletter what it is, so please send me tips on weird monopolies, stories I’ve missed, or other thoughts. And if you liked this issue of BIG, you can sign up here for more issues, a newsletter on how to restore fair commerce, innovation, and democracy. Consider becoming a paying subscriber to support this work, or if you are a paying subscriber, giving a gift subscription to a friend, colleague, or family member. If you really liked it, read my book, Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy.

cheers,

Matt Stoller