A Judge Just Gave Facebook a Big Antitrust Win — With an Asterisk

Late last month, a federal judge tossed both major antitrust complaints against Facebook, and it’s worth sitting with what that actually means, because the headlines have been a little breathless in both directions.

Judge James Boasberg, ruling on the cases filed by the FTC and a coalition of 46 states, dismissed both. The states’ case got tossed with prejudice — meaning that particular group of plaintiffs is done, full stop, at least on this theory. The FTC’s case was dismissed too, but Boasberg gave the agency 30 days to come back with an amended complaint. So this isn’t Facebook winning the war; it’s Facebook winning a battle over pleading standards.

The core issue, as I read it, wasn’t that the judge decided Facebook doesn’t have monopoly power. It’s that the FTC’s complaint didn’t do the legwork to plausibly establish what that monopoly power even consists of — how you define the relevant market (personal social networking, presumably, as opposed to social media broadly, which would rope in Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, and so on), and why Facebook’s share of it clears the bar for “monopoly” under the law. Alleging a big number and moving on isn’t enough. You have to show your work.

This is a pattern that shows up constantly in modern antitrust cases against tech platforms, and it’s part of why these suits are so hard to win. The products are free. The “market” is fuzzy — is Instagram a competitor to Facebook, a complement, or basically the same company wearing a different skin? Consumer harm, the traditional yardstick for antitrust since the Reagan-era shift toward the consumer welfare standard, is tricky to prove when nobody’s paying a price that could go up.

None of that means the underlying argument is dead. The FTC now has a month to go back, sharpen its market definition, and try again with actual data and analysis rather than assertion. Given how much political appetite there currently is — on both sides of the aisle, for what it’s worth — to bring Big Tech to heel, I’d be surprised if the agency just shrugged and walked away. An amended complaint seems close to inevitable.

What strikes me most is how procedural this whole saga is likely to remain for a while. We’re not close to a trial on the merits of whether Facebook actually is a monopoly. We’re arguing about whether the government’s homework is good enough to get past the front door. That’s normal for litigation of this size and complexity, but it’s a reminder that “antitrust case dismissed” and “company vindicated” are not the same headline, no matter how they get conflated on social media over the next few days.

For Facebook, this buys breathing room — no immediate threat of a forced divestiture of Instagram or WhatsApp, no discovery process grinding forward this summer. But given the states’ loss came with prejudice while the feds got a mulligan, I wouldn’t read too much long-term comfort into it. This one’s going to run for years regardless of how July shakes out.