A brief programming note for listeners of the Cato Daily podcast, after almost 18 years and more than 4,000 episodes, my time as host and executive producer of the podcast will come to an end on April 22nd.

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This is the Cater Daily podcast for Thursday, April 17, 2025. I'm Caleb Brown. This week,

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is in court against the Federal Trade Commission over

government claims that the company acted monopolistically in acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp.

It was Jennifer Huddleston and Alex Rineauer of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

Jen, let me start with you.

What gave us this lawsuit?

What was the environment or the edicts of government that gave us this suit to begin with?

This suit started in the first Trump administration, then was initially dismissed and modified in the Biden administration. But in both cases, the facts have largely been the same.

This is basically the government saying, we want to do over 10 years after we approved a merger,

that at the time was a risky bet. This lawsuit really focuses on meta's acquisitions of

Instagram and WhatsApp, both of which are now highly popular apps in their own

right, but at the time that they were acquired, the landscape looked quite different.

So now the government is trying to argue that consumers are worse off because of the

internet that we have today versus some hypothetical world that they could predict.

This requires a lot of assumptions about how these businesses would have evolved,

how social media would have evolved, how different transactions would have occurred,

that are really hard to predict, and that we certainly wouldn't want the government to be the one to try and predict.

Alex, a lot of people were excited to have the Trump administration coming back after years of the Biden

administration and an attempted weakening or outright destruction of the consumer welfare standard, should they be more or less encouraged by the fact that this lawsuit is ongoing?

Well, I'm certainly discouraged, right? But I think, you know, many in the Trump administration, particularly at the antitrust agencies, see this kind of as a

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