WASHINGTON, D.C. – Yesterday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that it would appeal the decision in its case against Meta, which sought to force the company to unwind its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, more than 10 years later.
In a statement, James Czerniawski, Head of Emerging Technology for the Consumer Choice Center, said:
“By appealing this decision, the FTC isn’t ‘protecting competition’ but trying to rewrite antitrust law because it can’t win under the existing rules. Dragging decades-old acquisitions back into court sends a strong negative signal to every founder and investor that success will be punished retroactively. In the tech sector, product cycles move faster than the government can create a simple PDF, and this attempt at a regulatory do-over doesn’t discipline Big Tech. It ultimately aims to kneecap the next generation of challengers.”
WHY THIS MATTERS FOR CONSUMERS
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- Uncertainty raises costs for consumers. If companies have to have resources dedicated to lawyers now to ensure their acquisitions are on solid footing in perpetuity, that means capital is getting diverted from engineering and product development into compliance departments. That drag shows up in slower rollouts of products and improvements, and fewer choices for consumers.
- Markets work when companies fight to win users by building better experiences online. If regulators start rewriting rules after the fact, firms become more cautious and less aggressive in competing, leaving consumers with stagnation instead of innovation.
The Consumer Choice Center will continue to advocate for policies that put consumers first, ensuring that innovation, competition, and free markets deliver the prosperity and choice that this deal promises.
Czerniawski concluded, “In the last few years alone, tech firms have spent hundreds of billions in a race to determine the present and future of technology. Meta invested more than $70 billion into data centers in 2025 as part of the AI buildout, and the federal government is still fixated on the purchase of Instagram a decade prior during the early days of the social media boom.”
The Consumer Choice Center is an independent, nonpartisan consumer advocacy group championing the benefits of freedom of choice, innovation, and abundance in everyday life for consumers in over 100 countries. We closely monitor regulatory trends in Washington, Brussels, Ottawa, Brasilia, London, and Geneva.
Find out more at consumerchoicecenter.org
