Meta Wins in Washington: Perils of Delay in Digital Awakening
PM Narendra Modi with EU delegation (Image credit X.com)
The FTC’s likely appeal won’t change a deeper truth: U.S. antitrust remains trapped in old-era logic. India must build its own digital-regulation playbook with stronger competition tools, a sharper data-protection regime and deeper ties with Europe.
By P SESH KUMAR
New Delhi, November 20, 2025 — Meta’s courtroom win in Washington is dramatic but far from final. The Federal Trade Commission, under Chair Lina Khan, is almost certain to appeal the ruling that spared Meta from a historic breakup, because the case represents the agency’s defining test of whether American antitrust law can be dragged into the digital age. The odds of an FTC comeback are not trivial, but neither are they generous. The appellate courts-and ultimately the Supreme Court-tend to hew closely to precedent, and the precedent here favours a narrow, price-based view of competition that does not easily capture the subtler harms of data concentration and platform dominance.
Yet the FTC’s path becomes clearer when set against Europe’s much more aggressive and modern regulatory machinery. European regulators, unencumbered by America’s rigid antitrust tradition, have repeatedly confronted Meta through privacy fines, competition probes and the sweeping Digital Markets Act, which treats data aggregation and cross-platform tying as structural problems, not incidental side-effects.
Meta’s courtroom celebration is already echoing across Silicon Valley, but beneath the champagne fizz lies an unspoken truth: the fight is far from finished. When Judge James Boasberg dismissed the FTC’s attempt to break apart Meta’s empire, he handed the company a spectacular win-but he did not slam the door shut on further challenge.
Lina Khan’s FTC has staked its identity on taming Big Tech. To walk away from this case would be to accept defeat not merely for an agency but for an entire philosophy of antitrust enforcement. In Washington’s regulatory circles, retreat is not on the menu. Appeal is almost inevitable.
But inevitability is not the same as likelihood of success. The FTC now faces the cold mathematics of appellate law, where broad rhetoric must be translated into sharp legal issues and where circuit courts show little appetite for remaking antitrust jurisprudence from scratch.
The central difficulty is the one the district judge highlighted: the FTC failed to prove present-day monopoly power. American antitrust law, as it stands, requires proof that the accused firm has the ability to raise prices, reduce output or degrade quality without fear of losing customers to rivals.
Digital platforms, of course, do not play by these rules. They do not raise prices-they do not charge consumers at all. Their power lies in extracting data, cross-linking networks, steering algorithmic attention and locking users into ecosystems where leaving feels like amputating a limb.
The FTC argued this with passion, but the court demanded hard economic proof, not conceptual re-imagination. That gap is where Meta won.
Unless the appeals court is willing to reinterpret what “market power” means in the digital age, the FTC will remain constrained by the very structure of US law. The appellate judges may sympathise with concerns about Meta’s reach, yet still rule that the law does not permit punishment unless the harm fits traditional antitrust boxes. The Supreme Court, if the case reaches that Olympian height, would be even less inclined to innovate.
That is the brutally honest assessment: the FTC can appeal, and likely will, but its chances of overturning the decision are modest unless it can demonstrate that the lower court erred in a way that is both doctrinally serious and easily remediable.
Across the Atlantic, however, regulators have been rewriting the script entirely. The European Union has ditched the American obsession with price effects and embraced a theory of harm rooted firmly in the dynamics of digital markets. The EU’s competition cases against Meta have treated data aggregation as a competitive weapon in its own right, and the European Court of Justice has upheld decisions that would be unthinkable in the United States, such as ruling that Meta cannot freely combine Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp data without explicit, unbundled consent.
It was Europe, not the US, that imposed a penalty close to a billion dollars for tying the Facebook Marketplace with its social network; Europe that outlawed Meta’s “consent or pay” model for targetted advertising as violating both competition norms and data-protection rights; and Europe that placed Meta under the unforgiving microscope of the Digital Markets Act, which demands interoperability, prohibits self-preferencing and requires large gatekeepers to open their services to competitors.
Where the FTC hesitated, Europe has legislated. Where American courts cling to precedent, Europe has created new frameworks. And where Meta flexes its legal victories in the US, it quietly complies with European decisions because the cost of disobedience is too high. If one cross-continental comparison captures the mood, it is this: the United States is still debating whether antitrust law should evolve, while Europe has already moved on.
This contrast matters immensely for India, which increasingly sees itself as neither a passive rule-taker nor a full-throated follower of either Washington or Brussels. India’s instincts are closer to Europe’s: data localisation mandates, stringent payment data rules, and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act’s architecture of conditional cross-border transfers reflect a sovereignty-first approach that treats data as a national asset.
But India also has the advantage of watching both models unfold. From the US it learns the dangers of relying on old tools to fight new giants. From Europe it learns the value of designing laws that recognise the unique economics of digital platforms.
India’s challenge is to craft a hybrid model that borrows Europe’s clarity without importing Europe’s bureaucracy, that respects innovation without accepting platform absolutism, and that keeps regulatory authority in Indian hands rather than outsourced to foreign precedents.
The FTC’s potential appeal may reshape the American conversation, but whether the appeal succeeds or fails, India’s path will ultimately be determined by its own legislative imagination, not by Washington’s judicial calculations.
India Must Hasten Digital Awakening
The Meta ruling should be a wake-up call for India, not a shock. It confirms that the United States—still home to the world’s largest tech firms and the political economy they shape—is unwilling to reinterpret antitrust law for the digital era unless compelled by Congress, not courts. India cannot wait for that shift.
Instead, it must continue strengthening its domestic frameworks: sharpening the Competition Commission’s ability to analyse data-driven abuses, operationalising the Data Protection Board with real investigative teeth, accelerating clarity on localisation rules and ensuring that foreign platforms operating in India remain subject to transparent compliance standards.
At the same time, India should expand its collaboration with Europe, especially in areas like algorithmic transparency, interoperability and data governance, where Brussels has already made considerable headway. The path ahead requires confidence, clarity and strategic autonomy. Meta’s American victory is important, but it is not destiny. The future of digital regulation in India will be written in New Delhi, not Washington.
(This is an opinion piece, and views expressed are those of the author only)
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