Meta Platforms Inc. heads to court on Monday to defend claims it is an illegal monopoly and should be broken up. The Federal Trade Commission, even without former President Joe Biden’s antitrust hawk, Lina Khan, at the helm, seems to be going full steam ahead — despite Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg’s attempts to wine and dine the president into a change of heart.
The start of the trial, which will scrutinize Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, comes a week after yet another congressional hearing into Meta’s broader conduct. Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former Meta executive, spoke of what she said were efforts to collaborate with China on AI and censorship (the company strongly disputes the characterization).
At the same time, Meta’s stock price has cratered, and the president’s tariff fiasco threatens the company’s advertising business and its multibillion-dollar plans to expand its data center footprint and build AI.
It’s probably not what Zuckerberg had in mind when he heralded Trump’s return in a call with investors in January. “We now have a US administration that is proud of our leading companies, prioritizes American technology winning and that will defend our values and interests abroad,” he said. “I am optimistic about the progress and innovation that this can unlock, so this is going to be a big year.”
Under Biden, the onslaught against Big Tech had intensified. Antitrust enforcement efforts, some launched during the first Trump presidency, were starting to bite. Most notably, Google was found guilty of spending billions of dollars to establish an illegal monopoly over online search. Now it’s Meta’s turn. Should it lose its case, it risks being forcibly broken up, with Instagram and WhatsApp becoming independent companies.
Meta has said the FTC’s lawsuit “defies reality.” To defend itself, the social networking giant, which has more than 3 billion active users, will argue that it faces healthy competition in the US with TikTok, X, Snapchat, YouTube and others — all of which vie for the same users and advertisers. Meta also considers Apple’s iMessage a competitor, given that many in the US use that instead of WhatsApp, which is more popular internationally.
The company was hoping that defense would be unnecessary, but any hopes that a change in the White House would mean a distinct change of course have been dashed. According to a running tally pulled together by my colleagues at Bloomberg Intelligence, there are no fewer than eight significant antitrust investigations into Silicon Valley giants, all pressing ahead.
Against Google, the Department of Justice has submitted revised remedies in its search monopoly case and left its biggest demands — that Google spin out Android or Chrome — intact. (They did, however, alter a demand that Google divest some efforts in AI.)
In addition to Meta, the FTC is continuing its efforts against Amazon.com Inc. — which include going after the difficulty of canceling a Prime subscription — scheduled to head to trial next year. “The Trump-Vance FTC will never back down from taking on Big Tech,” Andrew Ferguson, Khan’s successor at the FTC, said last month.
Perhaps most surprisingly for an administration that has tried to quickly unravel everything with Biden’s fingerprints on it, the FTC has opted to keep in place the stricter merger guidelines introduced by Khan, who made herself a figure of loathing in Silicon Valley by disrupting proposed big tech deals and relitigating already completed ones. If there’s a plan to make M&A easier under Trump 2.0, there have been few signs of it yet, though being watched closely is the progress of Google’s revived $32 billion effort to acquire cloud-security company Wiz Inc. The deal had been abandoned during the Biden administration in part because of worries the regulatory environment would present roadblocks.
The Trump administration may be more open to deals that could have been considered anticompetitive under Biden, but the new leadership brings its own demands. Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said his agency, which can intervene on some media-related deals, would seek to block mergers if it felt companies had adopted “invidious forms of DEI discrimination.”
Carr’s comments weren’t the only break from the norm. Last month, the two Democratic commissioners on the FTC board — which is meant to have five members — said Trump was attempting to fire them (he doesn’t have the legal authority and is being sued). One of them, Alvaro Bedoya, who’s been on the board since 2022, said the move was designed to help “the billionaires over the president’s shoulder at the inauguration.”
That’s not necessarily how the tech companies see it. One top antitrust lobbyist, with numerous Silicon Valley clients, told me that the move likely confirms Trump’s intent to fill the FTC with loyalists and use it as yet another avenue through which to settle scores and apply pressure. Those old scores likely include firmly held grudges against the tech companies the president felt treated him poorly. Already, he’s coaxed Meta and X, formerly Twitter, to hand over a combined $35 million to settle lawsuits related to his being banned on those platforms in aftermath of 2021’s insurrection.
Lobbying that might previously have included briefing rank-and-file regulatory staff on a tech company’s position will likely be narrowed. The task now is to appeal to an audience of perhaps just two: Trump and JD Vance — the vice president seems to be taking the lead in “taking on” Big Tech.
In Vance, Silicon Valley might find some morsel of optimism. “The United States of America is the leader in AI, and our administration plans to keep it that way,” Vance, a former venture capitalist, told delegates at the Paris AI summit in February. He echoed, loudly, Silicon Valley’s frustration at being “forced to deal with” the EU’s recently introduced Digital Services Act, and the General Data Protection Regulation. Both are more onerous than any laws passed in the United States.
Still, if tech leaders hoped President Trump’s return would mean being left alone by a more hands-off government, the early days of his second term suggest they made a significant miscalculation.
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