Meta Is a Monopoly Even if TikTok Can Compete
Despite the Trump administration’s best efforts, the American antitrust movement is alive and well, thanks to the work of state attorneys general. A bipartisan coalition of states recently litigated against Live Nation for illegal monopolization, and a jury agreed with them. At the request of the states and satellite provider DirecTV, a federal judge recently halted a merger between the local TV conglomerates Nexstar and Tegna that the Trump administration approved, holding that it would likely violate the Clayton Act. California Attorney General Rob Bonta has sued Amazon for price-fixing and apparently got company officials dead to rights conspiring with other businesses to keep prices up.
Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s Federal Trade Commission chair and antitrust guru Lina Khan has set up a new office at Columbia Law School, where she is getting a lot of positive attention from the media and ambitious members of Congress.
In that context, it is important to confront a common argument against antitrust action: that if an alleged monopolist or oligopolist faces any new competition, it proves that they weren’t an oligopolist. For instance, in the recent trial against social media giant Meta, Judge James Boasberg held that the company is not an illegal monopoly—despite voluminous evidence that Mark Zuckerberg bought Instagram and WhatsApp explicitly to prevent competition—in large part because it failed a decade-plus after those transactions to prevent the rise of TikTok, and is currently competing ferociously against the video-heavy upstart.
This is a bad argument.
For starters, antitrust theorists have never argued that monopolization makes competition impossible. There will be contradictory effects from consolidation: On the one hand, it will make competition harder by raising barriers to entry, creating slanted deals with suppliers, introducing a tacit threat of dumping below cost, and so on. On the other, it will make competition easier, at least in theory, by removing the penalty for lazy and inefficient management. In the long run, that can create opportunities for new entrants, but it doesn’t mitigate the harms to competition during the period of dominance.
There are specific dynamics to the social media market that make competition somewhat easier, even with heavy monopolization.
Indeed, many market rollups are conducted to preserve inefficient, outdated business practices from difficult competition. Louis Brandeis, the godfather of the new antitrust movement, argued back in 1912 that “a unit too large to be efficient is no uncommon incident of monopoly.” In the article, he cited statistics demonstrating that when J.P. Morgan and other financiers founded U.S. Steel in 1901 by buying out Andrew Carnegie, they overpaid to the tune of something like $250,000,000 precisely because the other steelmaking incumbents could not compete with him on price, and he was eroding their market share and profits.
In short, monopolies tend to get sclerotic and stagnant over time. Anyone familiar with, say, Verizon can attest to this.
It follows that a fat, stagnant monopolist can render itself vulnerable to a sufficiently determined and well-funded competitor. Meta is a perfect example of this. Just read this account of staggering mismanagement and incompetence from Sarah Wynn-Williams, a former high-level executive at the company. Or just open the Facebook app and take stock of its incomprehensible, Soviet nuclear submarine-esque interface. Or consider the fact that Meta spent a reported $88 billion on metaverse investments, only to end up with a platform with fewer users than a modestly successful indie game on Steam.
No company that named itself after one of the biggest faceplants in the history of American business can be considered well run. Indeed, the fact that it could lose so much money on facially preposterous investments and not go out of business is strong evidence by itself that Meta must have enormous market power. How else could it be so profitable? Boasberg could justify this only by referring to other Big Tech companies like Alphabet, which is also a comically obvious monopoly, not just in my opinion but in the eyes of two federal courts. Preventing this kind of eye-popping waste by ensuring that all markets have some competitive discipline is one of the important side goals of antitrust policy.
Sure enough, TikTok, having been developed by the immense Chinese tech company ByteDance, is exactly the kind of exceptionally well-funded competitor one would expect to take on a lumbering incumbent monopoly. Just imagine what other competitors might have had a chance, had Zuckerberg not spent most of a decade building a huge fortress around the whole social media market. (Facebook continued to copy, acquire, or kill nascent competitors you’ve probably never heard of throughout its period of dominance.) It is also worth noting that Meta competed with TikTok not with its own innovative idea, but by copying it as closely as possible with Instagram Reels; Google’s YouTube did the same thing with Shorts.
Then there are specific dynamics to the social media market that make competition somewhat easier, even with heavy monopolization. In the market for an actual product, one of the most powerful tools a monopolist can use is dumping—that is, selling the product below cost to drive a competitor out of business. Jeff Bezos did exactly this to destroy Diapers.com back in 2010.
In social media, by contrast, the whole business model is premised on giving apps away for free and then selling advertisements against user attention. They can’t reduce the price any more than that, and they can’t show fewer than zero ads. “There is a lower bound on ad loads below which Facebook can’t go. The lower bound is zero,” said John M. Newman, a professor at the University of Memphis School of Law who also worked on the Meta case during the Biden administration. “Whereas when you’re talking about money, a company could lower its price infinitely. It could even start paying people to use it.”
Finally, though this is not strictly relevant to legal questions, there is a question of comparative downside risk. If some company is held to be a monopoly and broken up when it is not, then some market will have a bit more competition on net. If it is a monopoly and not broken up, then everyone will suffer all the familiar issues of higher prices, lower wages, less innovation, and so on. With social media in particular, we allowed a huge swath of the global information environment to be dominated by a single clueless buffoon whose products mass manufacture racism and genocide. If Instagram and WhatsApp had remained separate companies, the whole world would undoubtedly have been better off.
These arguments also show some limits to antitrust as currently practiced. If a merger to monopoly in 2012 can be determined legal because of competition in 2025, it speaks to long timelines that make enforcement impossible. Either the courts need to move faster, regulators need to be more skeptical of these types of mergers, or additional tools to prevent the imposition of market power are needed.
But we should see these bad arguments to preserve monopolies, like eventual competition or the need to preserve “national champions,” for what they are. The biggest tell is that they usually come from the monopolists themselves.
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