Statement by Robert H. Bork, Jr.: Why is the FTC appealing its loss in Meta case?

The news that the Federal Trade Commission is going to appeal its failed monopoly claim against Meta/Facebook shows just how closely aligned some Trump regulators are with Biden’s FTC Chair Lina Khan and her progressive antitrust agenda.

The FTC lost before federal Judge James Boasberg, who threw out the Meta monopoly case late last year, rejecting the claim that the company had monopolized the market for “personal social networking.” The FTC charged Meta with monopolizing what that agency called the “personal social networking services” market. To imagine this claim, you would have had to exclude YouTube, TikTok, iMessage, Mastodon, LinkedIn, and many others from the market – not to mention growing personal networks on other major social media platforms – WeChat, Telegram, Snapchat, Reddit, Pinterest, Threads, Discord, and Tumblr.

The agency claims that Meta’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp more than a decade ago – transactions that were not contested by the government at that time –somehow permanently distorted the market. Judge Boasberg was having none of this. He wrote: “Like Heraclitus’s river, the rapids of social media rush along so fast that the Court has never even stepped into the same case twice … Each time it examined Meta’s apps, they had changed. The competitors had, too.”

The FTC and the Department of Justice Antitrust Division are not only continuing legacy Biden-era cases like this one. They also adopted and continue to apply Biden’s far-left progressive antitrust guidelines. Why on earth are they doing this? At a time when affordability is eroding the political standing of this administration, you would think that President Trump’s regulators would instead restore the Consumer Welfare Standard in antitrust rather than embrace Khan’s lawsuits and Khan’s guidelines.

Here’s to hoping that when the FTC goes back to court, it will find, this time, that it is actually stepping into the same river – and that the water is very cold.