In 2020, the Federal Trade Commission sued Meta, claiming Meta was a monopolist in the personal social networking market and that it had “preserved its monopoly not by outcompeting its upstart rivals Instagram and WhatsApp, but by buying them.” Potential consequences of a ruling against Meta could include a court-ordered spinoff of the two companies, threatening key growth engines and as much as half of Meta’s revenues.
Meta and its counsel, Kellogg, Hansen, Todd, Fiegel & Frederick, retained Compass Lexecon as consultants and expert witnesses in the case. Over the course of the roughly five-year litigation, six Compass Lexecon experts filed reports and testified in depositions: Professors Dennis W. Carlton, Daniel R. Fischel, Anindya Ghose, Steven Kaplan, John A. List and Itamar Simonson. These experts were supported by more than 100 staff, including Mary Coleman, Niall MacMenamin, Allan Shampine, Hal Sider, Joseph Goodman and Evan McKay, among others. The trial took place in the spring of 2025 before Judge James Boasberg of the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia and ran for more than six weeks. Meta ultimately shortened its rebuttal to a week and called only Professors Carlton and List to testify.
Judge Boasberg’s opinion included two trial exhibits from Professor List, finding that “[t]he results [in the figures] practically speak for themselves” that “TikTok takes an enormous amount of time away from Facebook and Instagram.”
Similarly, Judge Boasberg pointed to Professor List’s conclusion that when members of the Meta study panel “cut time from Facebook and Instagram, they were most likely to devote it to YouTube and TikTok.” Judge Boasberg also said that Professor List’s field experiment, “in the Court’s judgment, offers the single best evidence of what consumers consider alternatives to Meta’s apps.”
Judge Boasberg relied on Professor Carlton’s empirical analyses of two additional natural experiments, a 2021 Meta outage and a 2025 shutdown of TikTok in the United States, noting that the analysis “reinforces that [TikTok and YouTube] are the closest alternatives to Facebook and Instagram.”
Meta prevailed over an existential challenge to its business when a ruling in Meta’s favor was reached on November 18, 2025, with Judge Boasberg concluding that “it is clear that the FTC’s hypothesis about how people use these apps is consistently disproven by the data.”
Compass Lexecon experts provided theoretical and empirical responses to the FTC’s primary economic expert’s wide range of claims, along with empirical analyses of natural experiments involving a Meta outage and a TikTok shutdown.
Our leading affiliates testified about market definition based on a field experiment created by Professor List, an analysis of user response to Meta and TikTok outages in 2021 and 2025, respectively, a natural experiment on user response to a ban on TikTok in India in 2020, analysis of observational data from Meta and a de-merger simulation.
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