This photo illustration created on January 7, 2025, in Washington, DC, shows an image of Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, and an image of the Meta logo.
Drew Angerer | Afp | Getty Images
Meta will face off against the U.S. Federal Trade Commission on Monday in a high-stakes antitrust trial that could result in the company divesting Instagram and WhatsApp.
The trial in Washington is expected to last weeks and centers around the FTC’s allegations that Meta monopolizes the personal social networking market. CEO Mark Zuckerberg, former COO Sheryl Sandberg, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom and other current and former Meta executives are expected to testify, along with top brass from rivals TikTok, Snap and Google’s YouTube, according to a legal filing.
The FTC claims Meta shouldn’t have been allowed to buy Instagram for $1 billion in 2012 and WhatsApp for $19 billion in 2014, and the agency is calling for those units to be sliced off from the Menlo Park, California, company.
“Acquiring these competitive threats has enabled Facebook to sustain its dominance—to the detriment of competition and users—not by competing on the merits, but by avoiding competition,” the FTC said in a legal filing.
Meta disagrees and filed a pretrial brief last week reiterating its arguments that it is not a monopoly and that acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp has not harmed competition.
The trial will test the boundaries of the U.S.’s antitrust laws pertaining to corporate acquisitions, said Prasad Krishnamurthy, a law professor at U.C. Berkeley Law. The FTC will have to prove that not only did Meta monopolize the social media market but that its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp actively “harmed competition.”
“It’s a big case because it involves Meta, a social media giant, and it involves one of the most important kind of markets in the world, the social media market,” Krishnamurthy said. “It has big implications for something that consumers use as part of their daily life, Instagram and WhatsApp.”
Judge James E. Boasberg, chief judge of the Federal District Court in DC, stands for a portrait at E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Courthouse in Washington, DC on March 16, 2023.
Carolyn Van Houten | The Washington Post | Getty Images
The lead up to the trial
The FTC filed its antitrust case against Meta in 2020, but judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court in Washington dismissed the case in 2021, saying the agency did not have enough evidence to prove “Facebook holds market power.”
Despite the dismissal, the FTC in August 2021 filed an amended complaint with more details about the company’s user numbers and metrics relative to competitors like Snapchat, the now-defunct Google+ social network and Myspace. After reviewing the amendments, Boasberg in 2022 ruled that the case could proceed, saying the FTC had presented more details than before.
“Although the agency may well face a tall task down the road in proving its allegations, the Court believes that it has now cleared the pleading bar and may proceed to discovery,” Boasberg wrote.
Meta motioned to end the case last April, but Boasberg denied it, ruling in November that the company must face trial. In a small victory for Meta, however, Boasberg did dismiss the FTC’s allegation that Facebook restricted third-party app developers’ access to its platform to maintain market dominance.
The company is expected to push back on the rest of the FTC’s allegations at trial on Monday. In a recent pre-trial brief, Meta’s lawyers wrote that the FTC fails to acknowledge that the company competes with numerous rivals, including TikTok, YouTube and Apple’s iMessage.
But the FTC’s core argument is that the company has monopolized the specific market of personal social networking, saying there are no major alternatives to Meta’s apps like Facebook and Instagram, which are used by people to stay up to date and communicate with friends and family in an online, shared-social space.
This disputed notion of the market that Meta operates and competes in could be crucial to the case’s outcome, Krishnamurthy said.
“When you look at antitrust cases, the market definition that comes out of the case, even what ends up being the one that determines the ruling, is often not anything remotely like how lay people or even businesses in that market will describe it,” Krishnamurthy said.
Andrew Ferguson, Commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, speaks at a fireside chat at Harvard University’s second annual Conservative and Republican Student Conference 2025 at The Charles Hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S., Feb. 8, 2025.
Sophie Park | Reuters
What happens now
The case kicks off Monday and is expected to last several weeks, and it could be months before Boasberg issues a ruling. It’s also unclear how the change of power in Washington could impact the case.
After being inaugurated in January, President Donald Trump replaced FTC Chair Lina Khan with Andrew Ferguson. Khan served as chair of the commission under former President Joe Biden and earned a reputation for being tough on businesses.
With the tech industry in particular, Khan brought an antitrust case against Amazon in 2023 and unsuccessfully sued to block Meta, Nvidia and Microsoft’s acquisitions of virtual reality startup Within, chip-design giant Arm and Activision Blizzard, respectively.
Though this case kicked off during Trump’s first time in office, Khan continued to pursue it during the Biden administration, telling a House Committee in May 2024 that the lawsuit “highlights the competitive importance of data and notes that privacy degradation can constitute an antitrust harm.”
Some legal experts have said that Trump’s pick of Ferguson could mean the FTC eases up on antitrust enforcement.
Khan told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” in early Jan. that she hopes the new Trump Administration won’t give Meta a “sweetheart deal” in the FTC case after Zuckerberg’s overtures to the White House.
Ferguson, however, has not indicated that the FTC plans to abandon its case, and in March, he told CNBC that his team has a “trial coming up” and that they are “pressing toward that.”
“My job is to make sure that everyone is complying with the antitrust laws,” Ferguson said. “And if they aren’t, we go to court.”
Ferguson is painting himself as an independent and is proceeding with trial outside of the broader political world, said George Hay, an antitrust law professor at Cornell Law School. Hay added that he’s pleased that Ferguson appears to be moving forward with the case despite much of its progress occurring during the Biden Administration.
“When you come in to the FTC, you inherit a staff of professionals who’ve been doing a lot of work, and it’s not that easy just to say, ‘Throw it all away,'” Hay said.
U.S. artificial intelligence names were in negative territory in premarket trading on Friday, extending losses into their third day.
Oracle was 0.9% lower in premarket trading, paring earlier losses which saw it fall 1.3%. Nvidia shed 0.7%, Micron fell 0.9%, and CoreWeave was down 1.3% at 5:16 a.m. ET.
The share price of cloud computing and database software maker Oracle plummeted on Thursday, ending the session around 11% lighter after revenue earnings missed analyst expectations on Wednesday.
It dragged other AI-related names down with it despite a record-breaking rally elsewhere on Wall Street, suggesting investors are rotating out of tech into other parts of the market.
Despite booming demand for Oracle’s artificial intelligence infrastructure, it posted mixed results this week. Revenue came in at $16.06 billion, compared with $16.21 billion expected by analysts, according to data compiled by LSEG.
It followed widespread speculation around the long-term health of the company, with investors cautious about its reliance on debt to execute its AI infrastructure build-out. The broader industry’s circular dealmaking has also raised eyebrows.
“We think recent investor scrutiny on artificial intelligence’s potential and circular GPU deals can be overly punitive to key AI suppliers like Oracle,” said Morningstar Equity Analyst Luke Yang. “Oracle remains a respectable cloud provider that enjoys strong switching costs across its database, application, and infrastructure lineup.”
That said, the firm reduced its fair value estimate for wide-moat Oracle to $286 per share, down from $340. Morningstar’s moat rating refers to its assessment of a company’s durable competitive advantage.
“We lowered our long-term earnings outlook as delivering Oracle’s planned capacity on time now proved to be a harder task. However, we continue to view shares as undervalued,” Yang added.
Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on Dec. 11, 2025, in New York City.
Spencer Platt | Getty Images
The S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average advanced on Thursday, with both hitting fresh closing records. The Russell 2000 index also ended the session at a new high, following the U.S. Federal Reserve’s quarter-point cut on Wednesday.
But if investors analyze Thursday’s individual stock movements, they will see not all is well with the AI play yet. Oracle shares plunged nearly 11%, a day after it reported weak quarterly revenue, higher capital expenditure and long-term lease commitments. Oracle’s slide dragged down AI-related names such as Nvidia and Micron.
In extended trading, Broadcom shares fell 4.5%. The chipmaker beat Wall Street’s expectations for earnings and revenue, but CEO Hock Tan appeared to have failed to address worries that their largest customer, Google, might eventually make more of its chips in-house. Rising memory prices would also pressure margins, while the company’s chip deal with OpenAI might not be binding.
That’s why the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite fell 0.26% despite other major U.S. indexes hitting records. Putting the two together, that means investors are rotating out of tech into other parts of the market. The S&P 500 financials sector, for instance, closed at a fresh record, buoyed by jumps in Visa and Mastercard.
Even though the AI theme seems to be under scrutiny, other sectors are performing well on the back of a resilient U.S. economy — as signaled by Fed officials on Wednesday — and buoyed by interest-rate cut. So long as nothing throws a spanner in the works, looks like we’re all set for a happy holiday season.
— CNBC’s Kristina Partsinevelos contributed to this report.
Disney to invest $1 billion in OpenAI. The media giant will also allow Sora, OpenAI’s video generator, to use its copyrighted characters, under a $1 billion licensing agreement. “We think this is a good investment for the company,” Disney CEO Bob Iger told CNBC.
Reddit launches legal challenge in Australia. The county introduced a ban on social media for teens under 16, which came into effect on Wednesday. Reddit argues that the law is “invalid on the basis of the implied freedom of political communication.”
[PRO] Where will Oracle go from here? Analysts are re-looking their price targets for Oracle stock after the firm released a disappointing and confusing earnings report on Wednesday.
And finally…
Gen. David Petraeus, Former CIA Director, Fmr. Central Commander and American commander in Iraq.
White House’s new national security strategy gave Europe a scare last week as it warned the region faced “civilizational erasure” and questioned whether it could remain a geopolitical partner for America.
The strategy was, “in a way, going after the Europeans but, frankly, some of the Europeans needed to be gotten after because I watched as four different presidents tried to exhort the Europeans to do more for their own defense and now that’s actually happening,” David Petraeus, former CIA director and four-star U.S. Army general, told CNBC’s Dan Murphy in Abu Dhabi on Thursday.
Reddit, the popular community-focused forum, has launched a legal challenge against Australia’s social media ban for teens under 16, arguing that the newly enacted law is ineffective and goes too far by restricting political discussion online.
In its application to Australia’s High Court, the social news and aggregation platform said the law is “invalid on the basis of the implied freedom of political communication”, saying that it burdens political communication.
Canberra’s ban came into effect on Wednesday and targeted 10 major services, including Alphabet‘s YouTube, Meta’s Instagram, ByteDance’s TikTok, Reddit, Snapchat and Elon Musk’s X. All targeted platforms had agreed to comply with the policy to varying degrees.
Australia’s Prime Minister’s office, Attorney-General’s Department and other social media platforms did not immediately reply to requests for comment.
Under the law, the targeted platforms will have to take “reasonable steps” to prevent underage access, using age–verification methods such as inference from online activity, facial estimation via selfies, uploaded IDs, or linked bank details.
Reddit’s application to the courts seeks to either declare the law invalid or exclude the platform from the provisions of the law.
In a statement to CNBC, Reddit said that while it agrees with the importance of protecting persons under 16, the law could isolate teens “from the ability to engage in age-appropriate community experiences (including political discussions).”
It also said in its application that the law “burdens political communication,” saying “the political views of children inform the electoral choices of many current electors, including their parents and their teachers, as well as others interested in the views of those soon to reach the age of maturity.”
The platform also argued that it should not be subject to the law, saying it operates more as a forum for adults facilitating “knowledge sharing” between users than as a traditional social network, saying that it does not import contact lists or address books.
“Reddit is significantly different from other sites that allow for users to become “friends” with one another, or to post photos about themselves, or to organise events,” the platform said in its application.
Reddit further said in its court filing that most content on its platform is accessible without an account, and pointed out a person under the age of 16 “can be more easily protected from online harm if they have an account, being the very thing that is prohibited.”
“That is because the account can be subject to settings that limit their access to particular kinds of content that may be harmful to them,” it adds.
Despite its objections, Reddit said that the challenge was not an attempt to avoid complying with the law, nor was it an effort to retain young users for business reasons.
“There are more targeted, privacy-preserving measures to protect young people online without resorting to blanket bans,” the platform said.