On Tuesday, the federal judge James Boasberg dismissed the U.S. government’s main antitrust case against Meta, ruling that the company, worth more than $1.5 trillion, does not possess a monopoly in personal social networking. He did so in the face of strong evidence to the contrary, not to mention common sense.
But to dwell on the shortcomings of Judge Boasberg’s reasoning is to overlook something even worse: the message that his ruling sends to the country. The United States is in a precarious moment when it comes to the rule of law and democratic accountability. Unchecked wealth and corporate power have led many to doubt that our system is fair. Judge Boasberg’s ruling only fortifies the impression that the world’s wealthiest and most powerful corporations are above the law.
A chief goal of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which the government accused Meta of violating, is to make clear who is actually in charge of the county. As President Theodore Roosevelt explained in 1901, the “vital question” is whether “the government has the power to control the trusts.” He understood that unaccountable power is a threat to the Republic and that the spectacle of untouchable elites fosters widespread resentment.
Tuesday’s ruling is clearly wrong on the merits. The government charged that Meta, then called Facebook, broke the law when it bought up its competitors Instagram and WhatsApp in 2012 and 2014. Judge Boasberg threw out the case by concluding that Meta lacks monopoly power now, when the relevant question should have been whether it had monopoly power at the time.
But even to deny that Meta now holds a monopoly in personal social networking (sharing with friends and family) means ignoring a lot of direct evidence to the contrary. The government presented records of the company’s extraordinary and durable profits ($87.1 billion operating profit on $164.5 billion in revenue in 2024, for example), which is a textbook signal of monopoly power. The company has also subjected users to more and more ads, removed privacy protections and otherwise reduced the quality of its service without losing its user base, which is hard for a company facing competition to do.
Instead, Judge Boasberg held that the recent development and growth of an adjacent market for brief videos such as TikTok and YouTube shorts show that Meta does not — and somehow never did — possess monopoly power. It took an awful lot of strained legal thinking, in other words, to let the company off the hook.
Those failings aside, Judge Boasberg’s ruling is also flawed in a broader sense. Does anyone seriously doubt that Meta is the kind of company that antitrust laws were designed to restrain? In the 1980s and 1990s, judges held AT&T and Microsoft to account for antitrust violations, despite their protests. In the 1940s, when the federal judge Learned Hand pondered a similar case against the Alcoa company, which dominated the aluminum market in the United States, he granted that there were “legal niceties” in which one might get “entangled.” But he concluded that “if we hold that it is not a monopoly,” everyone not caught up in those niceties would “quite rightly I think, write us down as asses.”
Judge Boasberg’s ruling in the Meta case follows a ruling last year by the federal judge Amit Mehta, who found that Google is an illegal monopoly — yet this year could not bring himself to impose on Google a strong remedy. Such decisions effectively bless one of the major power imbalances of our age. They signal to companies that spending millions of dollars on lawyers will be repaid with billions of dollars in profit. And they reinforce the tech industry’s sense of impunity — its belief that it is an untouchable sovereign above the control of any mere human.
Despite a decade of Meta-related scandals and whistle-blowers, no public authority in this country has been able to hold the company meaningfully accountable for its behavior — a striking failure of our political system. Unfortunately, this ineffectuality is part of a broader trend. Many policies enacted in the 20th century to maintain economic fairness in the United States have been undermined or gutted: labor law, financial regulation, telecommunications law and taxation, among others. For decades those laws forestalled a collapse into a two-class society, avoiding the extreme class tensions that have upended other republics.
When Roosevelt embarked on his antitrust campaign in 1902, he did so with the view that it was necessary to preserve democracy. His was a moment like ours, with a dangerously unbalanced economy, extremist ideologies vying for adherents and a near-revolt of American farmers in the Midwest. But the federal and state governments diffused that anger by taming the railroads, regulating the banks and breaking up most of the big trusts.
This time around we are on track to do nothing of the kind. Congress has done little to restore economic balance and courts are showing themselves to be out of touch with economic realities that any American could describe. It is no wonder the population is growing increasingly cynical — and more and more ready to look to ideologies that promise to upend the entire system.
Tim Wu (@superwuster) is a law professor at Columbia and a contributing Opinion writer. He served on the National Economic Council as a special assistant to the president for competition and tech policy from 2021 to 2023.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, WhatsApp and Threads.
The post How Can Anyone Seriously Doubt Meta Is a Monopoly? appeared first on New York Times.
