Meta monopoly debate shifts
- Commentators argue TikTok's presence doesn't automatically disprove Meta's monopoly power. - The piece notes firms can retain dominance via audience scale, advertiser dependence, and cross-platform data advantages. - That reframes competition questions toward functional power and advertiser substitutability, with clear implications for platform strategy research (prospect.org).
A new argument in the Meta antitrust fight says TikTok’s rise does not, by itself, settle whether Meta still holds monopoly power. (prospect.org) The argument follows Judge James Boasberg’s November 18, 2025 ruling for Meta in the Federal Trade Commission case over Instagram and WhatsApp, where the court said Meta does not currently have monopoly power because TikTok and YouTube compete for user attention. (congress.gov) The Federal Trade Commission’s case, filed in 2020, alleged Meta preserved a “personal social networking” monopoly through its 2012 Instagram purchase and 2014 WhatsApp purchase, plus restrictions on software developers. The Federal Trade Commission case page still lists the matter as pending and shows trial filings through April to September 2025 and a December 2, 2025 memorandum opinion. (ftc.gov) The newer debate turns on what monopoly means in ad-supported platforms. A company can face consumer rivals and still hold outsized power if advertisers, publishers, and creators cannot easily replace its reach, targeting, and measurement tools with another service. (prospect.org) That question has grown sharper as Meta’s scale has kept expanding. Meta said on January 28, 2026 that its Family of Apps reached 3.58 billion daily active people in December 2025, while full-year revenue rose 22% to $200.97 billion and ad impressions rose 12%. (investor.atmeta.com) Congress’s research arm described the court’s decision as a market-definition loss for the government: the judge concluded Meta lacked monopoly power “in light of competition from TikTok and YouTube.” Legal analyses of the ruling said the court rejected the Federal Trade Commission’s narrower market and accepted a broader social-media frame. (congress.gov) (kellogghansen.com) The counterargument is that audience overlap is not the whole market. If an advertiser buying Facebook and Instagram cannot get the same mix of scale, cross-app data, and conversion tools on TikTok, then the platforms may compete for time without being close substitutes for ad buyers. (prospect.org) Meta and its supporters have argued the opposite for years: that social apps now compete in one fast-moving field where TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, and others all constrain one another. Boasberg’s 2025 opinion adopted much of that broader view, and outside analyses said the decision turned heavily on how the market was defined. (congress.gov) (skadden.com) The practical effect is that the fight has shifted from asking whether TikTok exists to asking what power Meta can still exercise despite TikTok’s existence. That is the question hanging over any appeal, future Federal Trade Commission theories, and the next round of research on how digital ad markets actually work. (prospect.org)
