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.

This implies that every horizontal acquisition is anti-competitive, does it not? If not I would love to read why not.

If there are 7 different grocery stores in driving distance of my house and two of them merge, I've still got a choice of 6 stores so there's still reasonable competition.

If there are 3 different grocery stores and two of them merge, though? That's a different matter.

And if 1 of the remaining 2 is the zero-waste organic store that only rich people and hippies use? It might not even be providing all that much competition.