(Reuters) - Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg is lobbying U.S. President Donald Trump to agree to a settlement that would prevent the company from facing an antitrust trial later this month, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing people familiar with the matter.
Meta and its representatives met with the president and his senior advisers ahead of an April 14 Federal Trade Commission trial that could force the company to unwind its acquisitions of messaging platform WhatsApp and image-sharing app Instagram.
"We regularly meet with policymakers to discuss issues impacting competitiveness, national security, and economic growth," Meta told Reuters.
The White House had no immediate comment, and a spokesperson for the FTC declined to comment.
The FTC is at the forefront of an antitrust crackdown on Big Tech companies that began during Trump's first term and continued under President Joe Biden. Democrats have questioned Trump's commitment to continuing the cases after moves by Big Tech companies to smooth relations with the White House, and Trump's sudden firing of the FTC's two Democratic commissioners.
FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson has said he plans to continue pursuing the agency's cases against Meta and Amazon.
The FTC sued Meta in 2020 during Trump's first term, alleging the company acted illegally to maintain a monopoly on personal social networks.
Meta, then known as Facebook, overpaid for Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 to eliminate nascent threats instead of competing on its own in the mobile ecosystem, the FTC claims.
Meta argues the acquisitions have been good for competition and consumers and that the FTC's case depended on an overly narrow view of social media markets and did not take into account competition from ByteDance's TikTok, Google's YouTube, X, and Microsoft's LinkedIn.
The case is one of five blockbuster lawsuits in which antitrust regulators at the FTC and U.S. Department of Justice are going after Big Tech.
Amazon and Apple are both being sued, and Alphabet's Google is facing two lawsuits, including one in which a judge recently found it unlawfully thwarted competition among online search engines.
(Reporting by Jaspreet Singh in Bengaluru and Jody Godoy in WashingtonEditing by Maju Samuel, Nia Williams and Matthew Lewis)
