Case against Facebook: bought the Instagram and WhatsApp because they became too big?

This article was last updated on April 15, 2025

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Case against Facebook: bought the Instagram and WhatsApp because they became too big?

It should never have happened, says the American market supervisor: the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp by Facebook. Today a lawsuit against Meta starts in the United States, as the company behind the three apps is called. According to the indictment, Facebook has abused its dominant position by stopping the competition in a special way: by buying them.

“You can buy better than entering the fight,” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg once wrote in an e-mail. In this case, the judge must decide whether Facebook has violated the law with that strategy. There is a lot at stake for Zuckerberg: the judge can decide that Facebook should say goodbye to Instagram and WhatsApp.

Facebook bought the popular apps more than ten years ago. In 2012, the company paid $ 715 million for Instagram. Two years later, the WhatsApp bought no less than nearly 22 billion dollars. The acquisitions were approved at the time by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the American market supervisor.

In the meantime, the same FTC looks at it differently. According to Meta, the fact that the regulator is now trying to undo the acquisitions is “absurd”. The company also says that it has enough competition in the field of social media, including Tiktok, YouTube and Snapchat.

Purchase competition or grow?

More than ten years ago Instagram and WhatsApp were still relatively small apps. The FTC did not see the acquisitions at the time as a problem. But in e-mails that have since come to light, according to the regulator, it appears that Facebook saw possible competition as a threat that the company could eliminate by taking over.

For example, Zuckerberg wrote on the day that Facebook announced to take over Instagram to a colleague: “I remember a message about how Instagram was a threat to us And not Google+. You were right. However, the thing with start-ups is that you can often take over them. “

Meta will indicate that Instagram and WhatsApp have become better apps thanks to investments. The company says that for the acquisition, Instagram was “a small app with an uncertain future” and that WhatsApp was transferred under Facebook ” Original subscription model To a free service with new functions “, such as video calling.

It is up to the court to make the difficult decision whether Meta has indeed abused its dominant position by suppressing threatening competition by buying them up. That is not easy: the question is what the company had looked like when Instagram and WhatsApp were not taken over. Could the apps have become so great that Facebook’s survival had joined?

Zuckerberg visiting Trump

Although the process really starts today, the run -up goes far back. Roomy four years ago The FTC already announced the case. In 2021, the judge wiped the charges off the table, because the FTC made insufficiently clear that Facebook had a position of power. A few months later, the supervisor managed to convince the judge, so that the case could continue.

In the run -up to the trial, Zuckerberg has tried to manage a settlement at President Trump, writes The Wall Street Journal. The FTC is officially an independent regulator, but the president can try to influence the organization. It is not clear whether that happened.

The Republican chairman of the FTC is known as a critic of large tech companies. “We have put some of the best lawyers in the FTC on it and are ready,” he told press agency in March Bloomberg.

The lawsuit will probably take a few weeks. Zuckerberg is expected to have witnesses personally, among other things to answer questions about the internal emails that the FTC brings up in the court case.

If the judge finds that Meta has indeed abused its dominant position, it does not immediately mean that the company should actually sell Instagram and WhatsApp. The FTC will have to prove in a second case that the sale can indeed restore the market balance.