The Federal Trade Commission is pushing for Instagram and WhatsApp to be separated from their parent company. This would have far-reaching consequences.
Mark Zuckerberg is angry. He organized a party for Donald Trump after his inauguration, terminated the fact-checking program on his platforms and ensured that the AI models at Meta no longer exhibit a “liberal bias.” And yet, the Meta CEO has been sitting in court in Washington since Monday, confronted with the potential dismantling of his empire. What happened?
By acquiring Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014, Zuckerberg bought himself excessive monopolistic control over the social media world, according to the U.S. competition and consumer protection agency, the Federal Trade Commission. There’s good reason to think this. Facebook is still the world’s largest platform of its kind. With around 3 billion monthly active users, it clearly surpasses Instagram, which occupies second place with 2 billion users. With their 5 billion combined users, the two Meta platforms are clear evidence of how powerful the U.S. company has become in its area. Chinese competitor TikTok only manages third place, with the controversial video service attracting 1.6 billion monthly active users.
The FTC’s big problem is that authorities waved through the takeovers of Instagram and WhatsApp. So, more than 10 years later, it is having to prove that it was wrong.
An Important Trial
The central question in court is how much power a company should be allowed to have in the digital space. It has been proven that the market suffers when corporations like Meta can simply buy up competitors, a practice that the FTC refers to as “killer acquisitions.” Smaller platforms like Mastodon and Bluesky would never be able to grow without fair market conditions. The quality of services could decline because users lack alternatives — an example of this would be the attempt by many users to switch from X to other platforms, often in vain due to the absence of comparable options. Meta’s takeover of Instagram has primarily resulted in more advertising and a weakening of privacy protections on the platform, with the latter particularly caused by the integration of data from Meta’s numerous services. After all, WhatsApp and Threads also belong to the Zuckerberg network.
And then there’s the political influence of such monopolies. Corporations can now control public discourse in the background with the help of algorithms, much as they do by actively lobbying for certain parties. X demonstrated what can be achieved politically during the last U.S. election campaign. Meta would have an even greater reach in this respect and considerably more power to more or less subtly plant the agendas of the new U.S. president or other individuals into the consciousness of users.
The verdict in the trial that has just begun, however long it may take, could be an unprecedented intervention to reshape the structure of a tech giant and a first step toward a new era of digital competition and regulation of large corporations. That should be welcomed. After all, you don’t want to see concentrated power of this magnitude in the hands of Elon Musk, Zuckerberg or anyone else.
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