The Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust trial of Meta Platforms, Inc. — parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — that commenced on April 14, 2025, in Washington, DC, has now concluded. The decision awaits James Emanuel “Jeb” Boasberg, chief judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, who says he plans to “take a welcome respite from thinking about this” until the first brief is due. He thanked everyone for their “hard work over the last four and a half years” — a reminder of how long this case has been in the works. And, in a trailer for the next episode, he added that the “issues are certainly interesting, and I’ll…get you my decision as expeditiously as I can.”
In fact, Meta is on trial for “monopolistic behavior” for buying companies that might have become potential competitors in the ever-shifting “social media” realm — Instagram and WhatsApp — many years ago, when no antitrust concerns were raised. Now, in hindsight, the FTC seeks to re-litigate that corporate strategy under a new ideological regime.
If antitrust law is now retroactively criminalizing business success, where does it stop?
This case did not begin under the Trump administration, but with President Trump once again calling the shots, and having campaigned as the champion of free markets and getting government “out of the way,” the spotlight swings to him.
The President can direct the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) — agencies of the executive branch — to cease pursuing a civil antitrust suit. Theoretically, he could declare that the case against Meta is not only legally questionable but rests on one hundred years of flawed economic reasoning and a moral crusade against business success.
If he does not, then what is the meaning of his pro-capitalist, anti-regulatory rhetoric? What is left of his promise to “drain the swamp” if he leaves untouched the most noxious swamp creature of all — antitrust law?
Meta on Trial
The FTC’s case, filed in 2020 and later amended under the Biden administration, accuses Meta of “illegally maintaining its social networking monopoly through a years-long course of anticompetitive conduct.” Specifically, the complaint challenges Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram (2012) and WhatsApp (2014) as retroactively anti-competitive acts aimed at stifling rivals. The antitrust violation called “intent to monopolize” easily covers this (who can prove “intent”).
Antitrust activity had been perceived to have lapsed into passivity since the 1970s under the influence of Chicago School theories seized and pushed by lobbyists and picked up by judges and regulators. Then, in 2021, President Joseph Biden appointed Lina Khan, a reincarnation of Progressive-era antitrust paranoia, to chair the FTC. Under her leadership, the FTC revived the “Big is bad” ethos that animated antitrust law in its Progressive Era origins. Corbin Barthold wrote in the May 16, 2024, City Journal: “Since becoming chair of the Federal Trade Commission three years ago, Lina Khan has sought doggedly to politicize antitrust law.”
He is certainly correct. She has done it in an unprecedented way, but, in a sense, antitrust always has been about politics — for example, the Marxist view of “monopoly capital” and the concentration of capital into fewer and fewer hands as capitalism’s supposed “contradictions” become manifest.
The case argues that Meta’s control of key social networks constitutes a monopoly. The FTC defines the relevant “monopolized” market as “personal social networking services,” which conveniently excludes platforms like YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat, and X (formerly Twitter). Meta’s defense argues that this characterization of its competitive universe is arbitrary, ignoring digital platforms’ rapidly evolving, highly competitive nature.
After initial procedural wrangling, including a federal judge dismissing the original complaint as “legally insufficient,” the revised case moved forward. The discovery was predictably deep and contentious. The bench trial, overseen by US District Judge James Boasberg, is anticipated to be about eight weeks, concluding before mid-June. The FTC aims to demonstrate that Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp were strategic moves to suppress competition in the personal social networking market, potentially leading to a court-ordered divestiture of these platforms.
Trial testimony and legal arguments have focused heavily on whether Meta’s past acquisitions truly foreclosed competition, or whether the government’s market definition artificially excludes vibrant competitors like TikTok and YouTube. Legal analysts note that Judge Boasberg, who previously dismissed the FTC’s first complaint as “legally insufficient,” had pressed both sides sharply but has not signaled how he may rule. President Trump, while empowered to order a halt to the FTC’s case, has so far taken no public action.
A History of Attacking Success
The Sherman Act of 1890* called for stopping “trusts” — concentrated industrial enterprises that Progressive reformers accused of controlling markets, fixing prices, and oppressing workers. The canonical example was Standard Oil. It has since been demonstrated decisively that Standard Oil became and remained temporarily dominant in a relatively new industry by driving down the price of oil while improving distribution and refining.
John D. Rockefeller’s “monopoly” was not a “coercive monopoly.” It did not achieve a market position enabling it to set prices without regard for competition; it held off potential competitors and gained market share by underpricing, innovating, and reinvesting. Critics of antitrust, like economist and historian Dominick Armentano, have shown that Standard Oil’s market share was already declining before it was broken up in 1911. Competition, not government, was the check on monopoly pricing.
As Armentano writes: “There is no evidence that Standard Oil charged monopoly prices or restricted output… Rather, it expanded output and lowered prices through innovation and superior efficiency.” Temporarily besting the competition by lowering prices and boosting productivity isn’t ‘anti-competitive.’ It is success in competition with all the attendant benefits for consumers.
The American railroads are often cited as motivating early antitrust efforts. Frank Norris’s 1901 novel, The Octopus: A Story of California, helped to inflame that sentiment. Some railroads were coercive — privileged by federal land grants, exclusive rights-of-way, and subsidies that created favored routes and blocked competitors. The problem wasn’t capitalism but the government (“crony capitalism”). Yet this remains a founding myth of antitrust: heroic government riding to rescue the public from the power of the “robber barons” of the marketplace.
The Robber Barons by Matthew Josephson came along in 1934 and as a best-seller during the bitter years of the Great Depression it lodged the term — and the idea of successful enterprise as inherently exploitative — in the American mind. Accuracy was never the point. Josephson wrote to Alfred Harcourt in 1932: “I wish to place the brand of obloquy squarely upon the masters of capital in 1870-1890” to focus upon “the whole character of their construction, rotten at the core by virtue of the profit-making motive.” Knowing his thesis before he began, Josephson went on a grim treasure hunt for every allegation and rumor that fit his view.
The Language of Dissent
For some decades, antitrust law managed to sail under the false flag of “pro-competition” and so pose as “free-market” legislation. As it attacked free-market success decade after decade, with an ideology one judge characterized as “sheer underdoggery,” it came under criticism from many viewpoints:
• Alan Greenspan, writing in 1961 under Ayn Rand’s influence, described antitrust as “the expression of envy and self-loathing by the mediocre” and warned that “no one can be certain he is not in violation of antitrust laws.”
• Robert Bork, in The Antitrust Paradox (1978), showed how the law’s application increasingly ignored consumer welfare in favor of vague political goals.
• Ludwig von Mises wrote that “a monopoly price is not a phenomenon of the unhampered market, but the result of interventionist policy” and that so-called monopolies cannot endure without state backing.
• Israel Kirzner argued that what regulators call “monopolistic behavior” is often entrepreneurial foresight — alertness to unexploited opportunities.
• Dominick Armentano, in Antitrust and Monopoly, argued that every major antitrust case was fundamentally an attack on successful firms offering better products at lower prices.
• Harold Demsetz, in a now-classic essay, argued that “the existence of monopoly profits is not evidence of market failure, but may well be evidence of market success.” He showed empirically that concentration frequently correlates with innovation, not suppression.
Mainstream figures of the Chicago School — like George Stigler and Richard Posner — conceded that antitrust enforcement had often devolved into arbitrary or politically motivated intervention. Advocates of antitrust law never effectively answered these critics. The response instead has been a ceaseless morphing of its antitrust’s rationale — from consumer prices to innovation, then to data privacy, and now to vague notions of “democratic values” and “fairness.”
Stakes in the Meta Case
Past antitrust crusades targeted industries with clear impacts on the physical economy: oil, aluminum, steel, telecom, semiconductors. Today, we are talking about social networks.
The FTC’s case treats Facebook and Instagram as life-supporting utilities. But social media platforms are cultural phenomena — popular one day, displaced the next. Facebook has lost its cachet among younger users. TikTok and Snapchat dominate teen engagement. Elon Musk’s aggressive transformation of X has shaken up that space. YouTube, Reddit, and Discord fragment users’ attention. In 2024, Meta began losing market share to AI-based platforms like Character.AI and Replika.
What is the “harm”? Meta’s platforms are free to users. Advertisers pay. Is the issue privacy? But the FTC case is not built on data protection grounds. Nor on misinformation or political bias — though Khan and others had hinted darkly at such motivations.
Ending the “Rule of Unreason”
The Meta case should not be about one company’s freedom — that should be a “no brainer” — but about the very legitimacy of a century-old legal doctrine. As a legal doctrine, antitrust was flawed when it was created, based on economic misconceptions and Marxist ideology, and in going on a century and a half, it has repeatedly dramatized its lack of conceptual clarity, its infinitely elastic concepts, and its true intent to attack the industry leader in each decade.
Trump, as a self-proclaimed defender of business, could act. He could make the principled, market-based case against antitrust with a century and a half of historical, legal, and economic evidence. He would not hurt his standing with the tech industry, to say the least, and would demonstrate a grasp and determination we have never seen in any president. Facebook users are mostly of the older generations who gave him his electoral victory.
Yes, he would face outrage — from the media, Democrats, even old-guard Republicans who see antitrust as “protecting competition.” But his base includes many who admire success, distrust bureaucratic interference, and value entrepreneurial risk-taking. They are heirs of Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Hayek, and Milton Friedman. They are not, in the end, partisans of “sheer underdoggery.”
Thus, a bold stand would clarify and hugely augment Trump’s free market credentials. A retreat would leave the FTC and DOJ to continue their longest war on capitalism — with no resistance from the president who vowed to restore it.
End the Doctrine
Every time antitrust law strikes, it offers a new rationale: monopoly, price fixing, tying, bundling, killer acquisitions, network effects. Its inner contradictions are inadjudicable. Its only common thread is punishing successful competitors in the name of protecting competition.
It’s time to challenge antitrust’s very existence. Not this one case. The whole edifice.
President Trump did not start this preposterous anachronism-of-a-case, but he could oversee its mercy killing. He may never have a better chance to do what no other president has done: not merely restrain antitrust excesses but repudiate its core premises.
He has the power. Will he use it?
*Followed by The Clayton Antitrust Act of 1914 and the Robinson-Patman Act of 1936.
