S8 Ep161: Federal Judge Dismisses FTC Antitrust Complaint Against Meta — Jessica Melugin — Judge Boasberg dismissed the FTC's monopoly complaint on the foundational grounds that the agency failed to properly define the relevant market, artificially inflating Meta's

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John Batchelor

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🗓️ 4 December 2025

⏱️ 6 minutes

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Summary

Federal Judge Dismisses FTC Antitrust Complaint Against Meta — Jessica Melugin — Judge Boasberg dismissed the FTC's monopoly complaint on the foundational grounds that the agency failed to properly define the relevant market, artificially inflating Meta's competitive share by excluding dominant competitors including TikTok and YouTube. Melugin documents that proper market definition analysis places Meta's competitive share at approximately 30–50%, insufficient to constitute monopoly status under established antitrust doctrine, with the decision correctly emphasizing forward-looking statutory authority rather than retroactive punishment of 2020 historical behavior.
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0:00.8	There's no better feeling than waking up surrounded by comfort.
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0:24.7	The home of your kind of cozy, Denelm.
0:27.8	The Home of Homes.
0:34.7	I'm John Bachelor.
0:35.9	Jessica Melugian is here and she's helping me understand a quite challenging
0:41.2	problem when I'm reading about an FTC complaint where it's not logical for my brain, so I have to
0:48.1	slow down and think, what? This is about monopoly practices by meta is the allegation.
0:55.9	And it made a lot of rain for a lot of law firms for a number of years.
1:00.0	And now it's ended.
1:01.7	I judge Bozberg, who ended it the first time at the end of the first Trump administration.
1:09.2	Did Judge Boasberg say anything new in the second time he ended the case or just sort of like dismissed?
1:15.3	How did it end, Jessica?
1:18.0	Well, I think it ended with Judge Bozber not accepting the premise of the market the FTC had put forth and said, you know,
1:25.4	look at these high market shares. If you exclude all these
1:28.1	real competitors that we know are competitors as users, look at this high market share and
1:33.7	look how dominant this has been. Rather than competing with these companies, META just went
1:40.3	ahead and bought them up. Well, the first problem with that is they didn't define the market
1:45.3	correctly. And what Judge Boeberg was said, we won't even have a chance to get to all these other
1:49.7	issues about did meta erect barriers to entry that made it hard for competitors to join the fight.
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