Meta antitrust trial kicks off in federal court

> "The FTC's lawsuit against Meta defies reality. The evidence at trial will show what every 17-year-old in the world knows: Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp compete with Chinese-owned TikTok, YouTube, X, iMessage and many others," Meta spokesperson Chris Sgro said in a statement.

Everyone knew at the time that Facebook bought Instagram because it threatened Facebook's dominance, and hindsight shows that exactly that happened. There's a huge swath of people that dropped off FB and now use Insta, but Meta owns both. It was a great move but it was absolutely anti-competitive at the time.

If everyone indeed "knew at the time" then why did the FTC allow the acquisition to go through in a 5-0 vote?

This is what I don't get, the FTC is suing because the FTC allowed something to happen, when the platforms had even more dominance than they do now?

Kind of stinks of less than valid motivations based on the timing of bringing this up over a decade after the fact.

Something being predicted poorly, hypothetically, doesn’t mean you can’t rectify a past mistake, right?

Not specifically related to this case, necessarily, but if you let an acquisition go through and discover a decade later that it was, in fact, anticompetitive (and intentionally so), presumably you would still try to break up the resulting monopoly, even if you didn’t predict it would happen?

Mistake shouldn't be based on outcome. If Instagram failed, would they still have the antitrust case?