The writer is former associate director for litigation in the FTC’s Bureau of Competition and co-founder of Simonsen Sussman
I joined the Federal Trade Commission in the summer of 2021, just weeks after a federal judge dismissed the agency’s antitrust complaint against Facebook. It was a frantic, all-hands-on-deck moment. I was thrown into a room with lawyers and economists and tasked with keeping the case alive.
We rewrote the complaint, which challenged Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp in 2012 and 2014 respectively. Even then we were well aware of how late it was. If the FTC eventually won at trial (which, spoiler, it did not), the appeals process and complexity of unwinding these companies meant that a remedy might not arrive until 2029 — 17 years after the first acquisition.