(DCNF)—The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) took Meta to trial last week, opening a federal antitrust assault that threatens to tear Mark Zuckerberg’s trillion-dollar empire apart.
The trial caps nearly five years of legal wrangling over regulators’ claim that Meta crushed competition — and illegally established social media hegemony — by acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp over a decade ago. At stake is more than Meta’s ownership of the billion-user properties, but whether regulators can set a blueprint for challenging Silicon Valley’s biggest players — or expose the limits of Washington’s ability to rein them in.
“[The recent swell of tech antitrust cases] represents, really, the first chink in the armor in years against these Big Tech monopolists,” Daniel Cochrane, a tech policy researcher at the Heritage Foundation, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “And with respect specifically to the Meta case, it could have really, really major implications for how the digital ecosystem is ordered going forward. If Meta were forced to unwind its purchase of Instagram and WhatsApp, it would offer the first real opportunity in over a decade for a serious competitor to their product.”
U.S. Judge James Boasberg, an Obama appointee, is presiding over the bench trial. With no jury in play, Boasberg alone will decide whether Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 broke antitrust laws by snuffing out competition.
The case has been a winding procedural journey. The FTC’s initial complaint, filed in 2020, accused Meta of illegally snuffing out competition with its acquisitions of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. Boasberg tossed the case in 2021, finding the agency “failed to plead enough facts to plausibly establish” that Meta — then operating as Facebook — held a monopoly over “personal social networking services.” Regulators returned just months later with a beefed-up complaint that survived a second dismissal attempt, setting the stage for this trial.
But even with a strengthened complaint, the FTC still faces an uphill battle, according to Josh Levine, a tech policy researcher who specializes in digital competition issues at the Foundation for American Innovation.
“The tough sledding they’re going to have, the uphill battle, is going to be increasingly proving this kind of fanciful market definition of personal social network services,” he told the DCNF. “The question is always in these kinds of cases: what’s the relevant market? How are you defining the relevant market? I’m quite skeptical of the market definition they’re drawing by isolating out Facebook and Instagram from pretty much every other social media app.”
The case hinges on how the court defines the market Meta supposedly monopolizes. The FTC claims Meta dominates “personal social networking services” geared toward connecting friends and family — a category narrowly defined to exclude platforms like TikTok, YouTube and X, which regulators classify as “content broadcasting” platforms in their amended complaint.
Meta’s defense attacks the FTC’s market definition as “gerrymandered” and artificial.
“[The FTC’s] alleged ‘personal social networking services’ market is a textbook example of a gerrymandered market, using an artificially limited set of only four companies — Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and MeWe — ignoring many of the most popular activities people engage in on Facebook and Instagram,” Jennifer Newstead, Meta’s chief legal officer, wrote in a press release announcing a motion for summary judgement in the case.
The company points to TikTok’s dominance in short-form video, YouTube’s grip on long-form video, X’s role in real-time public conversations and Snapchat’s enduring popularity in messaging and photo-sharing as proof users no longer engage with social media through neatly separated “personal networking” platforms. Instead, Meta argues, users blend messaging, entertainment and content creation across multiple apps — making the FTC’s narrow framing irrelevant to how real competition works today.
“If you look at some of the things the FTC is claiming — the most notable is that TikTok, YouTube, Discord, Snapchat are not direct competitors to Instagram and Facebook — that, to me, doesn’t really hold up,” Levine said, echoing Meta’s arguments.
WhatsApp presents an additional wrinkle in the FTC’s case, Levine said. Unlike Instagram, which shares more overlap with Facebook’s social networking model, WhatsApp is primarily an encrypted messaging service — competing more directly with platforms like iMessage, Signal and Telegram. Meta argues the app’s inclusion in the FTC’s theory of harm is misplaced, further complicating any effort to define clear competitive markets.
But even if Boasberg accepts the FTC’s market definition, regulators will still have to prove Meta’s acquisitions harmed competition — either by stifling innovation, limiting consumer choice, degrading service quality or blocking new rivals.
Cochrane suggested the FTC’s strongest case for anticompetitive behavior relies on internal Facebook communications revealing discussions about their so-called “buy or bury” strategy.
“The emails between Mark Zuckerberg and senior leadership between 2008 and the 2010s, when they acquired both Instagram and WhatsApp, I think that creates pretty clear evidence they had clear intent on anticompetitive behavior when they bought those apps,” Cochrane said. “The question, of course, the court is facing is whether they in fact have a monopoly.”
Beyond the internal Facebook emails, Cochrane pointed to Zuckerberg’s own testimony at trial as further evidence of anticompetitive intent. He said Meta’s leadership recognized Instagram offered a superior photo-sharing service that Facebook could not easily replicate, and calculated would take hundreds of millions — if not billions — of dollars to catch up. Rather than compete, Cochrane said, Facebook chose to buy Instagram to delay the rise of new rivals, a decision he argued substantiates the anticompetitive allegations at the heart of the FTC’s case.
Levine said even if regulators win the case — and even if Boasberg orders a breakup in the remedies phase — they would still have to clear the biggest hurdle: managing the logistical nightmare a divestiture would create.
“I also just think we have to think about the structural dynamics of, like, what does this even look like? How — how do you do this?” he said.
Forcing Meta to divest Instagram and WhatsApp would not only be the one of the most dramatic antitrust actions in modern U.S. history — it would also pose enormous technical challenges. After more than a decade of integration, Levine explained, unwinding the platforms would require separating user data, advertising infrastructure and backend systems that have been deeply fused across Meta’s businesses. Regulators have offered few specifics about how a breakup would work, or how it would affect the billions of users who rely on the company’s services every day.
Still, Cochrane says the logistical nightmare would be worth it.
“The big-picture point here is that we need to encourage people to think beyond the obvious and think beyond the status quo,” he said. “Because the status quo is one that is actually rather inhumane and it’s actually pretty totalitarian, if you think about it … if you think about it in terms of how [this case] would contribute to a post-Big Tech future, perhaps it opens the door for new rivals to come to the fore. There’s a lot of possibilities that could be unleashed if we had more competition and more real choice in these markets, but we have to get past the gatekeepers first.”
Regardless of the outcome, the FTC’s case against Meta reflects a broader shift toward a more aggressive antitrust posture in Washington. But it also highlights the steep obstacles regulators face in trying to retroactively unwind mergers that reshaped the digital economy years ago — and raises deeper questions about whether traditional antitrust laws are equipped to rein in Silicon Valley’s sprawling power.
The trial is expected to stretch through the summer, with a ruling likely by July, according to multiple reports. Appeals are all but guaranteed, meaning the battle over Meta’s future could drag on for years.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
