META will face trial after a US Federal Trade Commission lawsuit seeks to break it up, accusing it of buying Instagram and WhatsApp to crush emerging social media competition, a judge in Washington ruled on Wednesday.

As Reuters reports, the Federal Trade Commission sued the tech giant in 2020 during the Trump administration, alleging the company acted illegally to maintain a monopoly on social networks.

Then-Facebook paid handsomely to acquire Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 to create the Meta platform, which thus held the largest share of profits in the social media world after essentially buying out its competitors.

For its part, (now) Meta argues that the FTC’s claims are fairly one-dimensional as they fail to take into account that competition still exists due to the existence of TikTok from ByteDance, YouTube, X, Google, MSFT but also Microsoft’s LinkedIn.

It is noted that both Amazon and Apple AAPL are also facing two lawsuits from Google including one where a judge recently found that it was unlawfully hindering competition between online search engines.