“With apps surging and receding, chasing one craze and moving on from others, and adding new features with each passing year, the FTC has understandably struggled to fix the boundaries of Meta’s product market,” he wrote.

“Even so, it continues to insist that Meta competes with the same old rivals it has for the last decade, that the company holds a monopoly among that small set, and that it maintained that monopoly through anticompetitive acquisitions.”

Boasberg’s order is a victory for Meta, which has relied on Instagram and WhatsApp to bolster its reach among advertisers, younger audiences and users abroad. More than a decade later, those acquisitions have become crucial to the company’s AI strategy as it integrates its conversational chatbot across all of its social networks.

The high-profile trial elicited testimony from top executives, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, former chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg and Instagram head Adam Mosseri, who were often confronted with internal correspondence from a decade ago about how the company approached competitive threats.

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