Meta Platforms Inc. won a key lawsuit Tuesday after a federal judge ruled that the company’s acquisitions of the photo-sharing app Instagram and messaging service WhatsApp don’t violate U.S. antitrust law.

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg in Washington said the U.S. Federal Trade Commission failed to prove the deals allowed the tech giant to illegally monopolize the social networking market.

“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,” the judge wrote. “Whether or not Meta enjoyed monopoly power in the past, though, the agency must show that it continues to hold such power now. The Court’s verdict today determines that the FTC has not done so.”

The decision is a massive loss for the federal government, which sued the tech giant for antitrust violations in 2020 during the first Trump administration.

The news caused Meta shares to recoup some of the day’s losses. The stock was down 1.1% to $595.22 at 12:46 p.m. in New York.

The company didn’t have an immediate comment.

The FTC’s lawsuit led to a seven-week trial that began in April and featured testimony from several top company executives including founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, the well-known former chief operating officer who left in 2022.

At trial, the FTC argued that Meta, then known as Facebook Inc., bought the two companies in 2012 and 2014 rather than compete with them. Meta made the acquisitions, the FTC alleged, to reinforce its monopoly in the slice of the social networking market that’s focused on connections between friends and family.

Meta, meanwhile, argued that its competitors extend far beyond traditional friends and family sharing to include short-form video, commerce and private messaging. The company also called representatives from several other tech companies, including Reddit, X, TikTok, and Pinterest, to testify about how their products compete with Meta’s for user time and attention — and thus for advertising dollars.

The Meta case is one of five major antitrust lawsuits filed by the FTC or Justice Department against the world’s largest technology platforms. Two federal judges have already ruled that Alphabet Inc.’s Google illegally monopolized online search and advertising markets, while suits against Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc. remain pending.

(With assistance from Riley Griffin.)

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