Happy Wednesday! In what’s being described as a “Passover miracle,” Billy—a Cavalier King Charles spaniel who was abducted from Nahal Oz during Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attack—was found in southern Gaza last week. After rescuing her from the streets of Rafah, an Israeli reservist took Billy to a veterinarian and discovered through a microchip implant that she belonged to Rachel Dancyg, the ex-wife of Alex Dancyg, a Holocaust educator who was kidnapped into Gaza and later murdered. Billy will be reunited with her family today.

• Two American soldiers were killed, and another was seriously injured, in a vehicle accident near the U.S.-Mexico border on Tuesday, U.S. Northern Command said in a statement. The troops were deployed as part of the Joint Task Force Southern Border, which is leading the military’s mission to secure the southern border. The military has not yet released the names of the deceased soldiers, and an investigation into the cause of the accident is ongoing.
• President Donald Trump held a meeting in the White House situation room on Tuesday to discuss ongoing negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, Axios first reported. “Iran has to get rid of the concept of a nuclear weapon,” Trump told reporters on Monday, adding that he believed the Islamic Republic was intentionally stalling negotiations. White House special envoy Steve Witkoff, who on Saturday met with Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi in Oman, said Tuesday morning that “Iran must stop and eliminate its nuclear enrichment and weaponization program” for any deal to be reached—a reversal from the day before, when Witkoff told Fox News that Iran should not enrich uranium above 3.67 percent. 
• The U.S. refused to back a statement from Group of Seven (G7) allied nations—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom—condemning Russia’s Palm Sunday missile attack on the northern Ukrainian city of Sumy, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday. The missile strike—which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said intentionally targeted civilian areas—killed 35 people, including children, per Ukrainian officials. The report added that Canada, the current presiding nation of the G7 , informed the other countries it could not advance the statement without U.S. support.
• A Russian court on Tuesday convicted and sentenced four journalists—Antonina Favorskaya, Kostantin Gabov, Sergey Karelin, and Artyom Kriger—to five-and-a-half years in penal colony imprisonment for their alleged involvement in a banned anti-corruption group founded by the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. The Foundation for Fighting Corruption, founded by Navalny in 2011 to investigate corruption allegations in the Russian government, was outlawed in 2021 after being deemed an “extremist” organization. The journalists’ attorneys indicated plans to appeal the verdict. 
• The Chinese government on Tuesday directed the country’s airlines to block deliveries of Boeing airplanes and aircraft parts, the latest development in escalating trade barriers between the U.S. and China. In a social media post, President Donald Trump said that China “just reneged on the big Boeing deal, saying that they will ‘not take possession’ of fully committed to aircraft.” A total of 29 Boeing aircraft were set to be delivered to Chinese airlines in 2025, according to Bank of America analysts. 
• The Pentagon has placed two officials on leave following an investigation into leaks of sensitive information from the department, multiple outlets reported on Tuesday. Among them was Dan Caldwell, a top adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who on Tuesday was escorted out of the building. Caldwell, who is reportedly suspected of sharing classified information with journalists, was named as Hegseth’s representative to the White House in the leaked Signal group chat in which top U.S. officials discussed plans for an imminent attack on Yemen’s Houthis last month. Darin Selnick, the Defense Department’s deputy chief of staff, was also suspended and removed from the Pentagon in relation to the probe.  
• Former President Joe Biden on Tuesday gave his first public address since leaving the White House, accusing the Trump administration of threatening Social Security benefits. “Fewer than 100 days, this administration has done so much damage and so much devastation,” Biden said in Chicago at a conference hosted by Advocates, Counselors, and Representatives for the Disabled. “They’re taking a hatchet to the Social Security Administration, pushing out 7,000 employees, including the most seasoned officials.” Ahead of Biden’s remarks, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the administration would protect Social Security for “law-abiding, taxpaying American citizens and seniors who have paid into this program.”
• Three students were shot and injured at Wilmer Hutchins High School near Dallas on Tuesday, and a fourth student suffered a “musculoskeletal injury.” The suspect, whose identity has not yet been disclosed, initially fled the scene before reportedly turning himself in to a sheriff’s department that night. The four victims—all males—were hospitalized, and their injuries are not believed to be life-threatening. 

A lot has changed between the first and second Trump administrations. But one thing that has remained constant is the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) lawsuit against Facebook. The agency charged with enforcing antitrust laws sued the social media giant in December 2020, alleging its acquisitions of Instagram and the messaging platform WhatsApp constituted illegal market monopolization. More than four years and one corporate rebrand later—from Facebook, Inc. to Meta Platforms, Inc.—a trial on the suit finally began this week.

The case is one of the first high-profile actions of the Trump administration’s FTC, and it comes after years of growing support for more robust antitrust enforcement—bolstered in part by bipartisan antipathy toward Big Tech. But the agency may face an uphill battle as it seeks to convince the court to unwind acquisitions now more than a decade old. 

Monday was the first day of what is expected to be a roughly two-month-long bench trial where the judge in the case, U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg—yes, the same Boasberg overseeing the Alien Enemies Act deportations case (he’s got a busy docket)—evaluates the evidence and arguments to decide the outcome absent a jury.   

The FTC’s initial, more wide-ranging complaint was dismissed back in 2021, but the agency had the opportunity to refile a more tailored challenge. Boasberg ruled in November that the FTC’s evidence was sufficient to proceed to a trial, but he highlighted several issues the agency would have to address in order to win the case. “The commission faces hard questions about whether its claims can hold up in the crucible of trial,” he wrote. “Indeed, its positions at times strain this country’s creaking antitrust precedents to their limits.” 

The government’s case presents a classic monopolization story: An established player bought upstart challengers in order to stave off serious competition.“They decided that competition was too hard and it would be easier to buy out their rivals than to compete with them,” Daniel Matheson, the FTC’s lead trial lawyer on the case, said during opening arguments Monday. 

The FTC argued, citing comments and messages from Facebook’s own executives, that the company faced a serious threat during the transition to smartphones and mobile internet use in the early 2010s. Instagram and WhatsApp quickly gained popularity as Facebook lagged behind on mobile capabilities. “In the time it has taken us to get our act together on this Instagram has become a large and viable competitor to us on mobile photos,” Zuckerberg wrote in September 2011. 

In a 2012 email exchange discussing the reasons for buying Instagram, Zuckerberg said, “One way of looking at this is that what we are really buying is time. Even if some new competitor springs up, buying Instagram, Path, Foursquare etc. now will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get close to their scale again.” Facebook acquired the company in April 2012 for $1 billion. The FTC pointed to similar communications regarding WhatsApp, which Facebook purchased for nearly $19 billion in 2014. 

As a result of these allegedly anticompetitive acquisitions, Meta has maintained a monopoly in its market for more than a decade, the agency claimed in its pretrial brief. But in order to prove its case, the FTC must demonstrate evidence of monopoly such as the ability of a company to raise prices or decrease quality without affecting profitability—high prices are direct evidence used by competition authorities to demonstrate monopoly power, but such a route is more challenging when dealing with a social network that consumers can use free of charge. Alternatively, the FTC could provide more “indirect” evidence of monopoly by demonstrating that a company holds a dominant share in a specific market with high entry barriers preventing consumers from accessing comparable substitutes. 

The agency has presented both direct and indirect evidence. FTC lawyers contend that direct evidence of monopoly power can be found in Facebook’s increased “ad load” and changes to its privacy protections, which they argue degraded the quality of the user experiences but did not result in a loss of users. Meta, meanwhile, maintains that the company has grown and improved the quality of both Instagram and WhatsApp since their purchases, benefiting users.  

But analysts believe the case will ultimately hinge on the definition of the market in which Meta allegedly holds a monopoly. “The real stuff is all going to be indirect evidence, things like the market share and the market definition,” Brian Albrecht, the chief economist at the International Center on Law and Economics, told TMD. The FTC argues that Meta holds a monopoly in personal social networking (PSN) services that connect families and friends (e.g., Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat). This PSN market is distinct from the general social media or content market, the FTC argues, which includes platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and X that are more focused on content and entertainment. 

“They’re saying that within this personal social network services market, there are networks developed that promote sharing among families and friends, that there are small communities built within that framework that represent distinctive market niches. Market niches that are not really covered, or addressed so directly by YouTube, by X, by TikTok, and that it’s appropriate for the court to treat that niche as a distinctive arena in which to evaluate the competitive behavior,” William Kovacic, a former FTC chair, said Sunday. The FTC claims that Meta holds more than 80 percent of this specific market as measured by the time people spend using the company’s services.

But Meta has strongly contested the agency’s conception of the relevant market. “The evidence at trial will show what every 17-year-old in the world knows: Instagram competes with TikTok (and YouTube and X and many other apps),” Jennifer Newstead, Meta’s chief legal officer, said in a statement Sunday. “They’ve gerrymandered a fictitious market in which Facebook and Instagram compete only with Snapchat and an app called MeWe. In reality, more time is spent on TikTok and YouTube than on either Facebook or Instagram—if you only add TikTok and YouTube into the FTC’s social media market definition, Meta has <30% market share.” 

In his November ruling, Judge Boasberg expressed some skepticism about how the FTC had approached the market dominance question, citing “significant unresolved questions” regarding metrics like time spent using social media services and saying the agency will need “more precision” at trial. 

Zuckerberg testified in court on Monday and Tuesday, sparring with the FTC’s trial lawyer over some of the internal emails. One of several tech CEOs who has courted the Trump administration heavily, Zuckerberg has reportedly lobbied the White House to drop the case and last month proposed a nearly $1 billion settlement to avoid trial, according to the Wall Street Journal. 

But the lobbying didn’t dissuade the administration from continuing with the case. “We all saw, full on in 2020, how much power these social media platforms have over every aspect of our daily life, of our politics, our elections, our social lives, our economic lives,” FTC Chair Andrew Ferguson said Sunday, painting the FTC’s challenge not as a narrow antitrust issue but a blow against Meta’s corporate power and role in politics. “That’s what this case is about; it’s about addressing that sort of power and making sure 2020 can never happen again.” 

As we wrote in December, Ferguson is a Big Tech critic, so it’s unsurprising to see him forcefully back the case. But it remains to be seen whether the administration will pursue aggressive antitrust enforcement in industries beyond Big Tech. “The real test will be the new cases, the new investigations,” Albrecth said. “We’ll see when those come.”