The U.S. Department of Justice has opened an investigation into the NFL over potential anticompetitive tactics, a government official told CNBC. The investigation stems from questions about “affordability for consumers and creating an even playing field for providers,” the official said.

The government’s investigation comes as the NFL is looking to renegotiate media rights deals with its broadcast networks earlier than previously planned, CNBC previously reported. The league is also reportedly considering a bigger package of games with streaming giant Netflix.

In a statement to CNBC, the league called its media distribution model “the most fan and broadcaster-friendly in the entire sports and entertainment industry,” and said that more than 87% of NFL games are on free, broadcast TV.

Teams are always shown on broadcast networks in their local markets, regardless of whether games are airing on cable TV or streaming-only.

“The NFL has for decades put our fans front and center in how we distribute our content. The 2025 season was our most viewed since 1989 and reflects the strength of the NFL distribution model and its wide availability to all fans,” the league said.

The Wall Street Journal earlier reported the DOJ probe.

Last week, Fox Corp., which owns a package of Sunday NFL games, and Sinclair, owner of affiliate stations, raised a similar issue with the Federal Communications Commission. The media companies had reportedly told the FCC that sports shouldn’t be allowed behind paywalls — such as exclusive streaming deals — since it means higher costs for consumers and further issues for legacy TV.

As the cost of sports media rights have skyrocketed, so, too, have the costs for consumers to watch, via increasingly piecemealed media packages that can require multiple subscriptions as well as price hikes for those services.

The NFL is currently in the midst of an 11-year, $111 billion media rights agreement that lasts through the 2033-34 season with broadcast networks CBS, NBC and Fox, as well as Disney’s ESPN and Amazon’s Prime Video.

However, the league is beginning to renegotiate its deals with broadcast partners, which would see increased revenue for the league and would eliminate an opt-out clause after the 2029-2030 season, ensuring a longer runway for the games to remain with their current broadcast partners.

All major sports leagues in the U.S. have seen a similar divvying up of games across traditional TV and streaming platforms, but the NFL, with the shortest schedule, still has the highest concentration of games on broadcast TV.

Recently the NFL began renewal talks with Paramount Skydance’s CBS for a deal that would keep a package of Sunday games on the broadcast network, CNBC previously reported. CBS currently pays approximately $2.1 billion a year, and a potential increase as a result of the renewed negotiations could see the network pay more than $3 billion in the next deal, CNBC reported.

While live sports, especially the NFL, garner the highest ratings for linear TV, the league has entered into various streaming-only agreements in an effort to reach consumers without traditional TV packages.

Amazon’s Prime Video is the exclusive home of Thursday Night Football, and in the last few years Netflix has been the host of Christmas Day games. The league has also signed one-off exclusive streaming deals for certain games, including the playoffs, with the streaming counterparts of legacy media companies like NBC’s Peacock.

During a 2024 CNBC x Boardroom Game Plan event, NFL Executive Vice President of Media Distribution Hans Schroeder discussed the growing importance of streaming for the league’s future. At the time he noted the league’s Wild Card game that aired exclusively on Peacock as “the most transformative moment” in recent years.

— CNBC’s Jessica Golden contributed to this report.

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For the record, I’m not a big fan of the NFL’s business model.

Among the aspects I find loathsome (its embrace of gambling is at the top of the list) is its nifty little exemption from antitrust laws that allows it to collectively bargain on behalf of its teams with broadcasters vying to air the nation’s most popular sport.

The league cranks out $23 billion annually in revenue business; it’s worth around $228 billion.

It shouldn’t have to rely on any government subsidy, particularly as it uses its muscle to squeeze every last dollar out of its various deals with networks, advertisers or anything else that touches its vaunted “shield.”

Even worse, its clout goes beyond the game or simply chasing money.

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Channeling progressive agitprop during halftime shows has become the norm.

So has its embrace of the destructive habit of gambling that turns sports fans into addicts glued to their screens as they bet on every last angle of the game.

Put all that together and you’re just asking for scrutiny.

The investigation was sparked by US Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on antitrust.

Last month, he wrote federal regulators imploring them to take a look at the NFL’s antitrust perk.

FCC Chairman Brendan Carr followed up with his own missive.

Both made their points: The antitrust exemption — created by Congress via something known as the Sports Broadcasting Act way back in 1961 — allows the league to sell TV rights as lucrative package deals to networks airing games on free, ad-supported TV.

It now seems like an anachronism.

Who in 1961 envisioned streaming, which seems to be carrying more games every year?

“Instead of a small number of free broadcast networks, the NFL now licenses games simultaneously to subscription streaming platforms, premium cable networks and technology companies operating under different business models,” Lee wrote last month to the head of the DOJ Antitrust Division and the Federal Trade Commission.

Put me down as a bit dubious.

There are also some uncomfortable truths about the NFL’s programming suggesting to me that, at least for now, the case against the league is overblown and the exemption is safe.

Lee, for instance, argues that “to watch every NFL game during this past season, football fans spent almost $1,000 on cable and streaming subscriptions.

And why is it a violation?

OK, but why is it a violation of antitrust laws if consumers have to pay to watch every NFL game?

I can remember my old man back in the 1970s jerry-rigging the TV antenna on our house to try catching a signal to watch games played in Philly because he hated the Giants so much (and had bet on the Eagles, but I’ll save that for another column).

If we had streaming back then, he probably would have splurged to see every game he could — and that’s a good thing: You pay for what you get.

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There is no constitutional right to see every game on any given weekend.

The NFL argues that 87% of its games appear on free TV, and that 100% of the games of competing teams are broadcast in their local markets for free and aired without a streaming sub.

Also, unless I’m missing something, you get more than just NFL games if you’re buying a streaming package.

You’re getting all the entertainment that comes with it and there’s nothing stopping you from canceling your streaming subscription once the season ends.

Here’s where things get complicated: The NFL was a nascent, some would say weak, business back when the antitrust carve-out was created.

The negotiating power resided with the networks and the exemption allowed the NFL to pool revenue to help teams in smaller markets and keep the game competitive.

That’s clearly no longer the case.

Even with the Bad Bunny halftime fiasco (songs in Spanish that most Americans didn’t understand and ignored) and a lousy Super Bowl this past February, the big game averaged a record 128 million viewers.

And let’s not forget that the NFL is run by some of the most aggressive executives in corporate America.

It’s always looking to make a dollar whether it’s with its new flag-football league or playing games in other countries.

Its embrace of gambling and partnerships with sports books may be seedy, but it keeps fans hooked.

That mentality is great for the bottom line; the least valuable NFL franchise, the Cincinnati Bengals, is worth more than $5 billion.

The most valuable, the Dallas Cowboys, is worth $13 billion.

You can see how that power could breed arrogance.

That’s why some NFL insiders I speak to say the league needs to watch its back on this one, maybe take a beat before it continues to squeeze every last dime it can.

“This antitrust stuff is total BS,” said one NFL executive while attending a recent owners meeting.

“But this has to be taken seriously,”

In other words, what Congress created could easily be taken away.

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The high-level meeting that took place about 10 days ago hasn’t been previously reported. Several White House officials also suggested during the sitdown that a broader investigation is necessary focusing on Netflix’s market power, a government official who attended the confab said.  

“Basically everyone agreed that Netflix presents unique antitrust concerns and if it won the bidding war it would be one long slog and touch off an investigation along the lines of those of Google and Amazon,” the government official said. 

Netflix’s interest in acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery has raised antitrust concerns at the White House, sources told The Post. Getty Images

“Netflix already has market dominance but if you add a major streaming service that would stifle competition at some point,” the official added.

White House and Netflix press reps had no immediate comment.

The meeting comes as the Warner Bros. Discovery board has scheduled a Monday afternoon deadline to receive a second round of offers for the company. WBD controls the No. 1-ranked Warner Bros. studio and the No 3 streaming service, HBO Max, as well as a slew of cable channels including HBO and CNN.

Paramount Skydance, controlled by Hollywood producer David Ellison and his father, billionaire Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, is expected to raise its initial bid, which in mid-October came in at $23.50 a share for the entire company.

Cable giant Comcast, run by Brian Roberts, is also expected to sweeten a more recent offer, although it has been given low odds of making it through the Trump regulatory gauntlet because of the president’s disdain for Comcast’s relentlessly anti-MAGA cable channel MSNBC, recently renamed MS NOW. 

Warner Bros. Discovery’s board has scheduled a Monday afternoon deadline to receive a second round of offers for the company. SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Meanwhile, Netflix is also expected to make a sweetened bid for WBD’s studio and streaming service – and faces a different but equally difficult set of hurdles getting regulatory approval, Trump officials said during the meeting.

The 28-year-old company created by Reed Hastings and led by its voluble CEO Ted Sarandos is currently the world’s largest streaming service with 300 million subscribers. White House officials at the meeting suggested its size could hamper competition in streaming where Americans increasingly consume their entertainment as cord cutting continues to shrink the cable TV business. They also raised the likelihood of European regulatory push back, the government official said.

Sarandos as well as a slew of company legal officials and lobbyists have been pressing the flesh in DC. As previously reported by The Post, they’ve been pleading a case that an acquisition of the No. 3 streamer and a major studio wouldn’t violate antitrust laws because of a legal theory known as “category ambiguity.”

Netflix chief Ted Sarandos and company legal officials and lobbyists have been pleading the case in Washington, DC that a deal for No. 3 streamer HBO Max and a major studio wouldn’t violate antitrust laws. Alan West/Hogan Media/Shutterstock

According to the theory, antitrust law doesn’t necessarily apply to streaming services because of the prevalence of content that’s available on YouTube, TikTok and other social media. The idea is that streaming video is now so ubiquitous that it can’t be cornered and price gauged in the traditional sense.

But the pitch, while winning converts with members of the WBD board and some quarters of the DC regulatory framework, is now being met with significant skepticism from senior White House officials who advise Trump on media policy, according to a government official who attended the meeting last week. 

Trump officials also voiced concern that Netflix is already wielding enormous power in the Hollywood ecosystem, not just with consumers but also when dealing with program creators and talent. A recurring theme of Trump’s regulatory agenda during his first term and today has been anti-competitive business models of media and tech concentration, the source noted. 

Paramount Skydance, controlled by Hollywood producer David Ellison, above, and his father, billionaire Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, is expected to raise its initial bid of $23.50 a share for all of Warner Bros. Discovery. Evan Agostini/Invision/AP

If Netflix’s bid won out, the scale and scope of the deal to buy HBO Max and the studio should lead to a lengthy, possibly yearslong probe by the DOJ’s antitrust division run by Trump appointee Gale Slater. The probe could expand beyond the merits of its WBD deal to its entire operations, “something that the company has avoided until now,” the government official who attended said.  

The meeting follows a letter by GOP California congressman Darrell Issa to Slater and her boss US AG Pam Bondi warning that “Netflix currently wields unequaled market power. Adding both HBO Max’s subscribers and Warner Bros.’ premier content rights would further enhance this position.”

But Sarandos may feel he has no choice but to make a run at WBD, and eventually fight off Trump’s regulatory cops in federal court if they nix his bid.

“If Paramount owns all its content plus Warner and HBO they will have control of a massive and quality library, and put Netflix behind the eight-ball in terms of negotiating for WBD content on its streaming service,” a media industry insider told The Post.

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“Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation. xAI will take immediate legal action,” Musk wrote in a post on his social media platform X Monday.

He added that X and his Grok AI chatbot are excluded from the App Store’s “Must Have” list when the apps rank as #1 in news and #5 overall, respectively – asking if Apple is “playing politics.”

Elon Musk threatened Apple with legal action as he accused its App Store of antitrust violations. Getty Images

Apple did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.

In response to Musk’s accusations, Altman wrote in a post: “This is a remarkable claim given what I have heard alleged that Elon does to manipulate X to benefit himself and his own companies and harm his competitors and people he doesn’t like.”

The war of words quickly devolved into mudslinging over follower counts.

“You got 3M views on your bulls— post, you liar, far more than I’ve received on many of mine, despite me having 50 times your follower count!” Musk wrote late on Monday.

Altman said a “skill issue” or “bots” were to blame for Musk receiving fewer views on some of his posts. 

“Will you sign an affidavit that you have never directed changes to the X algorithm in a way that has hurt your competitors or helped your own companies?” Altman pressed, adding that he would “apologize if so.”

This is a remarkable claim given what I have heard alleged that Elon does to manipulate X to benefit himself and his own companies and harm his competitors and people he doesn’t like. https://t.co/HlgzO4c2iC

— Sam Altman (@sama) August 12, 2025

Musk posted about an hour later: “Scam Altman lies as easily as he breathes.”

Last year, Apple partnered with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into its iPhone, iPad, Mac laptop and desktop products. 

At the time, Musk warned that “if Apple integrates OpenAI at the OS level, then Apple devices will be banned at my companies. That is an unacceptable security violation.”

It’s just the latest in a yearslong feud between Musk and OpenAI, which the billionaire parted ways with in 2018 after co-founding the AI firm in 2015.

Elon Musk questioned why X and his Grok AI chatbot are excluded from the App Store’s “Must Have” list. Apple

In February 2024, Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman, accusing them of betraying the firm’s nonprofit mission by partnering with Microsoft.

He withdrew the suit in June but refiled it two months later.

Prior to the verbal sparring session, Musk had cheered Grok’s performance on the App Store – rising past Google as the fifth top free app.

OpenAI chief Sam Altman pressed Elon Musk to sign an affidavit in the pair’s latest verbal spat. AP

xAI released its latest chatbot version, Grok 4, last month, while OpenAI unveiled GPT-5 on Thursday.

Musk’s legal threats come soon after Robert Keele, who led the legal department at xAI, announced he left the company to spend time with his family – though he added there was “daylight between our worldviews” with Musk.

OpenAI and xAI did not immediately respond to The Post’s requests for comment.

Apple is currently facing a landmark lawsuit from the Department of Justice that alleges the company maintains an illegal monopoly over smartphones. 

And in June, Apple lost a plea to halt changes to its App Store from a ruling that the company could no longer charge a commission on payment links inside its apps.

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US District Judge Amit Mehta is expected to rule by August on the best way to rein in Google’s illegal dominance over online search after ruling last year that the company was a “monopolist.” The Justice Department, rather than merely punishing past misdeeds, wants Google and CEO Sundar Pichai to sell the Chrome web browser, among other remedies.

On May 6, a group of former DOJ and Federal Trade Commission antitrust enforcers submitted an amicus brief warning the federal judge against aggressive remedies. The lawyers said their brief was made “in support of neither party” and was intended to guide Mehta on following the “proper remedy standard.”

However, many of brief’s coauthors have direct or indirect links to Google and other Big Tech firms. That includes Joe Sims, who last year dismissed criticism of Google’s widespread evidence destruction as “silly,” and Willard Tom, who once defended Google in the high-profile antitrust lawsuit filed by “Fortnite” maker Epic Games.

Their arguments closely match those of the defense offered by Google, which claims the DOJ’s proposals go far beyond the bounds of antitrust law and that the court risks jeopardizing American AI leadership – and even national security.

The lawyers’ links to Big Tech raised alarms with Google’s critics, including Sacha Haworth, executive director at the Tech Oversight Project, who told The Post that it “speaks volumes that the only people rushing to Google’s defense are people paid by Google to care.”

Google faces a potential breakup of its business in the search trial. AP

“If Google is broken up, it will be a win for our digital economy that will lead to lower prices and more choices for consumers,” Haworth added.

Aside from a forced divestment of Chrome, the DOJ wants Google to share its search data with rivals. The agency has also asked Mehta to consider the potential impact of Google’s massive investments in AI-powered search when crafting any remedies.

Elsewhere, the feds want Google to be barred from paying billions to companies like Apple to ensure its search engine is set as the default option on most smartphones. They also propose a forced divestiture of Google’s Android software if initial remedies prove ineffective.

Google, led by CEO Sundar Pichai, is fighting to avoid a forced divestiture of Chrome. Getty Images

“We’ve long said the DOJ’s proposals go miles beyond the Court’s decision,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “We appreciate that a wide range of experts, academics and businesses agree.”

An amicus brief – also known as a “friend of the court” brief – generally includes information that interested third parties want to flag for the judge’s consideration before reaching a verdict.

In a filing, the brief’s coauthors noted that they were not paid by any outside party and that no outside party had contributed to the writing.

Contributors included Tad Lipsky, who heads up the competition advocacy program at George Mason University’s Global Antitrust Institute – which has received millions in funding from Google and other Big Tech firms while frequently arguing for a light touch on antitrust enforcement.

Sims retired as a partner at law firm Jones Day in 2016. In July 2024, Jones Day successfully secured dismissal of a class-action suit accusing Google of antitrust violations tied to its Maps service.

Google faced criticism for destroying employee chat logs that it had been ordered to preserve. REUTERS

Last August, Sims raised eyebrows when he argued that Mehta was “silly” for criticizing Google over its deletion of employee chat logs during the DOJ’s search trial – in violation of court orders to preserve evidence.

“No firm has an obligation to create a paper trail for people or entities that may want to attack it,” Sims wrote on X. “If anything, it has a fiduciary obligation to do just the opposite.”

Tom is a former partner at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius who represented Google against “Fortnite” maker Epic Games’s antitrust lawsuit until his retirement in July 2022. Google eventually lost the suit in a bombshell ruling that has major implications for its “Google Play” app store.

Richard Parker previously represented Apple in the ebooks case bought the DOJ and currently works at Milbank Tweed, a firm that advised Google in the search trial and helped argue its ongoing appeal of the Epic Games verdict.

The brief notes that Parker contributed in “his personal capacity” and had “not worked for Google on this matter or any other matter.”

US District Judge Amit Mehta is pictured. AFP/Getty Images

Terry Calvani worked law firm Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer from 2005 to 2019 – a period of time in which the firm served as an outside counsel for Google in several lawsuits. From 2020 to 2025, Calvini was a senior adviser at strategic communications firm Brunswick Group, which counts Google as a client.

Several enforcers who backed the amicus brief, including Sims and Lipsky, are listed as authors for Truth on the Market – a competition law-focused blog with close ties to the Big Tech-funded International Center for Law and Economics.

Jon Neuchterlein is a nonresident senior fellow at the Technology Policy Institute, which acknowledges on its website that it has received from donations from the likes of Google, Amazon, and Apple, among other tech firms.

Judge Mehta is expected to rule on potential remedies by August. U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia

From 2015 to 2024, Neuchterlein was a partner at the law firm Sidley Austin. During his tenure, the firm counted Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Intel among its clients.

In their brief, the antitrust lawyers urged Mehta to take “caution” when considering two elements of the DOJ’s proposal – the forced Chrome divestiture and the search data-sharing requirement – to avoid overstepping the bounds of antitrust law.

“Antitrust remedies in a monopoly maintenance case are intended to terminate the unlawful conduct and prevent its recurrence, and remediate proven harm to competition caused by the illegal conduct,” the brief said.

The lawyers added that remedies that “further than that or that are not narrowly designed to achieve those goals can undermine the purpose of the antitrust laws by inhibiting the very robust competition that those laws are intended to promote.”

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The last time the courts seriously weighed the wisdom of breaking up a giant technology company was a quarter-century ago, after Microsoft was found to have illegally stifled competition in personal computer software.

A Federal District Court judge said yes to forcing Microsoft to split in two, separating its monopoly Windows operating system from its Office productivity products and other software. But an appeals court threw out the order, calling the breakup option “a remedy that is imposed only with great caution, in part because its long-term efficacy is rarely certain.”

In a pair of landmark proceedings this month in two Washington courtrooms, the issue of possibly breaking up a big tech company will be on the judicial table again.

In an antitrust trial that began on Monday, the Federal Trade Commission argued that Meta maintained an illegal monopoly in social media through its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. The agency seeks to force Meta to divest both. Next week at a separate proceeding, a federal judge will hear arguments from the Justice Department about why the court should break up Google in order to remedy the company’s monopoly in internet search.

“Divestiture can be an entirely acceptable remedy, depending on the severity of the harm,” said William Kovacic, a law professor at George Washington University and a former chairman of the F.T.C. “But it can be risky surgery.”

For generations, the courts have faced the quandary of what action to take in major antitrust cases once a dominant company has been found to have engaged in anticompetitive behavior. In a 1947 Supreme Court ruling, Justice Robert H. Jackson memorably wrote that if a court’s solution did not open the market to competition, the government would have “won a lawsuit and lost a cause.”

But while a court’s ruling is based on examining facts in the past, its remedy looks to the future. The goal is to free up markets rather than hobble them — and create a competitive environment that results in more new ideas, new companies, more innovation and lower prices.

The challenge is taking on new significance as regulators make a major push to rein in the tech giants in a string of antitrust cases objecting to the power they have over communications, commerce and information.

In a different lawsuit against Google, the Justice Department is awaiting a judge’s decision on the company’s dominance in advertising technology. The department has also sued Apple over its tactics to protect its lucrative iPhone franchise. The F.T.C. has sued Amazon, saying the company illegally shielded its monopoly in online retailing from competition.

This wave of antitrust litigation, including appeals, is likely to last for years. And if the government wins any of its cases, a judge could order a breakup — the worst-case outcome for the companies.

History shows that these orders can be effective, antitrust experts said. But the results in improving competition has been mixed.

Standard Oil, an energy giant founded by John D. Rockefeller in 1870, was the defining case of the progressive, trustbusting era of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The company was broken up by the Supreme Court in 1911, split into 34 entities that had made up the original Standard Oil Trust, which controlled the oil industry’s production, refining, distribution and pricing. While that initially helped competition, over time the trust’s descendants became oil giants of their own, including Exxon Mobil, Chevron and ConocoPhillips.

The breakup of AT&T, in a settlement in 1982, followed a lengthy antitrust suit by the Justice Department, which accused the company of illegally monopolizing the telecommunications market in America. The local phone business was split into seven regional “Baby Bell” companies, and the order opened up the long-distance phone and telephone equipment markets, increasing competition and driving down prices.

In antitrust jargon, a “structural” solution like this generally means a breakup. But there are steps short of a forced sell-off that can shape markets and stimulate competition, antitrust experts said.

In 1969, under pressure from a government antitrust suit accusing it of monopolizing the computer market of its day, IBM unbundled its hardware from software — treating them as separate businesses, sold and priced independently. Software would no longer be “free,” included in the price of a computer. That helped ignite the rise of the commercial software industry, with Microsoft as the biggest winner.

Microsoft avoided a breakup, but its eventual settlement in 2001 contained a prohibition against contracts that had essentially used its Windows monopoly as a club by restricting personal computer makers from distributing the software of upstart rivals. That restraint kept the door open to new competition in browser software and search. Google was the leading beneficiary.

“Those were strong remedies without a breakup that created more competition,” said Fiona Scott Morton, an economics professor at the Yale University School of Management.

The next powerful tech companies to face courtroom scrutiny are Meta and Google.

On Monday, the F.T.C. and Meta, formerly Facebook, presented their opening statements in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive, then took the stand. The essence of the government’s case is that Facebook vastly overpaid more than a decade ago for Instagram and WhatsApp, to kill them off to protect a lucrative monopoly in social networking.

Meta replied that Instagram and WhatsApp had grown and flourished under its ownership. And, the company argued, there is plenty of competition in the social networking market, including the meteoric rise of TikTok.

Should the government win the Meta case, the likely remedial step, antitrust experts said, would be a court order to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp.

Next week in the same Washington court, Google faces the remedies stage in the lawsuit by the Justice Department and a group of states over its internet search monopoly. In August, Judge Amit P. Mehta found that Google illegally maintained a search monopoly.

To restore competition, the government asked the court to order Google to sell Chrome, its popular web browser, and either spin off Android, its smartphone operating system, or be barred from making its services mandatory on Android phones. Chrome and Android are powerful distribution channels for Google search.

Google has described the government’s list as a “wildly overboard proposal” that “goes miles beyond the court’s decision” and that would harm consumers by offering them inferior products. The company has also said it will appeal.

Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia University who was a White House adviser on technology and competition policy in the Biden administration, supports breakups in the Google and Meta cases.

“If you want to stir the pot, structural solutions are clean and essentially self-executing — you break it up and walk away,” he said. (Mr. Wu writes for The New York Times’s opinion section.)

But any breakup order would be appealed, and the higher courts today seem to echo the skepticism of the Microsoft era.

In a rare unanimous decision in 2021, the Supreme Court ruled that the National Collegiate Athletic Association could not use its market power to stop payments to student-athletes. It was essentially a wage price-fixing case, decided entirely for the plaintiffs.

Yet Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, writing for the court, digressed to make a broader point about judicial restraint in antitrust matters.

“In short,” he wrote, “judges make for poor ‘central planners’ and should never aspire to the role.”

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The Federal Trade Commission on Monday accused Meta of creating a monopoly that squelched competition by buying start-ups that stood in its way, kicking off a landmark antitrust trial that could dismantle a social media empire that has transformed how the world connects online.

In a packed courtroom in the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia, the F.T.C. opened its first antitrust trial under the Trump administration by arguing that Meta illegally cemented a monopoly in social networking by acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp when they were tiny start-ups. Those actions were part of a “buy-or-bury strategy,” the F.T.C. said.

Ultimately, the purchases coalesced Meta’s power, depriving consumers of other social networking options and edging out competition, the government said.

“For more than 100 years, American public policy has insisted firms must compete if they want to succeed,” said Daniel Matheson, the F.T.C.’s lead litigator in the case, in his opening remarks. “The reason we are here is that Meta broke the deal.”

“They decided that competition was too hard and it would be easier to buy out their rivals than to compete with them,” he added.

Meta’s lawyers denied the allegations in opening arguments, countering that the company faces plenty of competition from TikTok and other social media platforms. The F.T.C. approved the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp more than a decade ago, and it would set a dangerous precedent for the business world to try to unwind the mergers, the lawyers added.

“This case is a grab bag of F.T.C. theories at war with fact and at war with the law,” said Mark Hansen, the company’s litigator and a partner at the law firm Kellogg, Hansen, Todd, Figel & Frederick. “The facts are going to prove that the F.T.C.’s theories are all wrong.”

The trial — Federal Trade Commission v. Meta Platforms — poses the most consequential threat to the business empire of Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s co-founder. If the government succeeds, the F.T.C. would most likely ask Meta to divest Instagram and WhatsApp, potentially shifting the way that Silicon Valley does business and altering a long pattern of big tech companies snapping up younger rivals.

Still, legal experts cautioned that it might be challenging for the F.T.C. to win. That’s because the government must prove something unknowable: that Meta, formerly known as Facebook, wouldn’t have achieved the same success without the acquisitions. It is also extremely rare to try to unwind mergers approved years ago, legal experts said.

“One of the most difficult things for antitrust laws to deal with is when industry leaders purchase small potential competitors,” said Gene Kimmelman, a former senior official in the Obama administration’s Department of Justice. Meta, he added, “bought many things that either didn’t pan out or were integrated. How are Instagram and WhatsApp different?”

The efforts continue a yearslong bipartisan pursuit to curtail the vast power that a handful of tech companies have over commerce, the exchange of ideas, entertainment and political discourse. Despite attempts by tech executives to court President Trump, his antitrust appointees have signaled that they will continue the course.

The F.T.C.’s case against Meta is the third major tech antitrust lawsuit to go to trial in the past two years. Last year, the D.O.J. won its antitrust case against Google for monopolizing internet search. A federal judge is set to hear arguments over remedies, including a potential breakup, next week. The D.O.J. also completed a separate trial against Google for monopolizing ad technology, which is still being decided by a federal judge.

The Justice Department has also sued Apple, and the F.T.C. has sued Amazon, accusing the companies of antitrust violations. Those trials are expected to begin next year.

The case against Meta could affect its 3.5 billion users, who on average log onto Facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp multiple times a day for news, shopping and texting. Instagram and WhatsApp have attracted more users in recent years as Facebook, Meta’s flagship app, has stopped growing.

F.T.C. Chairman Andrew Ferguson was in the courtroom to listen to the government’s opening statement. Meta’s chief legal officer, Jennifer Newstead, and Joel Kaplan, its chief global affairs officer, also attended. Alex Schultz, Meta’s chief marketing officer, sat at the litigator’s table and will serve as the company’s executive at the trial.

Presiding over the case is Judge James Boasberg, 62, the senior judge in the federal court. He is already in the national spotlight for rejecting the Trump administration’s effort to use a powerful wartime statute to summarily deport Venezuelan migrants it deemed to be members of a violent street gang.

Judge Boasberg has said he had never been a user of Meta’s apps, but was familiar with Facebook Live, which has been featured in criminal trials. He took notes as Mr. Matheson explained the government’s definitions of social networking and methodology to determine Meta was a monopoly. He was equally focused on Meta’s rebuttal of those definitions.

The F.T.C. argued that Mr. Zuckerberg said in 2006 that Facebook was used to connect “actual friends.” The F.T.C. has argued that Meta has had a monopoly in social networking since 2011 and that SnapChat was among the only comparable platforms to Facebook and Instagram.

Meta rejected the F.T.C.’s definition of social networking, saying it faces competition from TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube and other platforms. Mr. Hansen said it competed with messaging apps for sharing content between friends and family.

He said more than half of all engagement on Facebook and Instagram is of videos, which put Meta squarely in competition with TikTok, the fast-growing short-video app. When TikTok was momentarily shut down in January, Meta saw a surge of usage to Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, which shows the company has plenty of competition.

“Meta has no monopoly,” Mr. Hansen said.

During what is projected to be an eight-week trial, the government and Meta are expected to tell competing versions of the company’s 20-year growth story.

The F.T.C.’s argument hinges on Section 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, which forbids a company from maintaining a monopoly through anticompetitive practices.

The F.T.C. accused Facebook, as the company was previously known, of struggling to build a mobile app and fearing that Instagram would rapidly outpace it in popularity. The company overpaid when it purchased Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion, the F.T.C. argued.

In 2014, as WhatsApp grew, Meta offered to buy the company for $19 billion — also far above its market value, the government said.

The F.T.C. plans to highlight a paper trial of emails between Meta executives, alongside other evidence, to argue that the company bought the start-ups because they were threats.

In his opening remarks, Mr. Matheson mentioned documents, including what he described as a “smoking gun” February 2012 email by Mr. Zuckerberg, in which the chief executive discussed the rise of Instagram and the importance of “neutralizing a potential competitor.” In another email in November 2012 to the former chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, Mr. Zuckerberg wrote, “Messenger isn’t beating WhatsApp, Instagram was growing so much faster than us that we had to buy them for $1 billion.”

The F.T.C. lawyer said Meta bought WhatsApp to keep it from being acquired by competitors like Google, which were trying to use a messaging service to launch a competing social network. Meta’s acquisition of WhatsApp was intended to build a “moat” around the company’s monopoly in social networking, Mr. Matheson said.

The government is set to call witnesses from Meta, as well as competitors, venture capitalists, economists and media industry executives. Mr. Zuckerberg was expected to be called as the first witness as soon as Monday. The F.T.C. said Ms. Sandberg, and Kevin Systrom, co-founder of Instagram, would testify this week.

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The Trump administration isn’t letting up on the tech giants.

On Monday, the Federal Trade Commission will face off with Meta in court over claims that the social media giant snuffed out nascent competitors when it bought Instagram and WhatsApp. And on April 21, the Justice Department will argue that a federal judge should force Google to sell its Chrome web browser to limit the power of its search monopoly.

Both cases, which helped set into motion a new era of antitrust scrutiny, were filed during President Trump’s first term in office. They were advanced by the Biden administration, which also filed monopoly lawsuits against Amazon, Apple and Google’s ad technology business.

Investors in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street hoped that Mr. Trump might show technology companies more deference during his second term, as he promised to deregulate industries. Some legal experts think the administration could still take a lighter hand on blocking mergers and setting proactive regulations for tech.

But so far, Mr. Trump’s appointees have promised to continue much of the scrutiny of the biggest tech companies, despite the industry’s hopes.

“I think that they may not have fully focused on how much the first Trump presidency had to do with setting in motion this re-examination of tech,” said Bill Kovacic, a former F.T.C. chairman.

Here’s what to know.

Who is in charge of antitrust enforcement now?

Mr. Trump appointed Andrew Ferguson as chair of the F.T.C., which enforces antitrust and consumer protection laws. Mr. Ferguson, a lawyer who spent much of his career working for powerful Republican senators, has said he wants to increase scrutiny of the ways that social media companies decide to take posts down. Conservatives have complained for years that platforms like Facebook and YouTube disproportionately censor right-leaning viewpoints.

“I will throw every resource the agency has at prosecuting the cases against Big Tech that we’ve got going,” Mr. Ferguson said in an appearance on the Bloomberg podcast “Odd Lots” this year.

The new leader of the Justice Department’s antitrust division, Gail Slater, a veteran tech and media lawyer, worked in the White House during Mr. Trump’s first term. She has also pledged to enforce antitrust laws aggressively.

“It’s now a bipartisan issue, and there’s a consensus around the need for robust antitrust enforcement,” Ms. Slater said at an event hosted this month by Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley start-up accelerator, which has pushed for more antitrust scrutiny of the tech giants.

Where do the major antitrust lawsuits against the tech giants stand?

Five government cases accuse tech companies of maintaining illegal monopolies, and all are moving through the courts. The companies deny the allegations.

• The F.T.C. sued Meta in 2020, arguing that its acquisitions of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 violated the law by using what regulators call a “buy or bury” strategy to eliminate its nascent rivals. The trial is expected to last into July and feature testimony from high-profile figures including Meta’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg.

• The Justice Department sued Google in 2020 over claims that it had a monopoly in online search. A federal judge ruled for the government last year and will convene a roughly three-week hearing on how to address Google’s monopoly. The government has suggested that the company sell Chrome, among other measures. Google has proposed fewer restrictions and has said it plans to appeal.

• The Justice Department accused Google in 2023 of illegally dominating the advertising technology business. A federal judge heard arguments in that case last year, and a ruling is expected soon.

• The F.T.C. accused Amazon in a 2023 lawsuit of squeezing small merchants that use its marketplace to sell to consumers. A federal judge rejected Amazon’s attempt to dismiss the case last year. It is scheduled to go to trial next year.

• The Justice Department sued Apple last year over claims that the company’s interwoven ecosystem of technology makes it hard for consumers to ditch their iPhones and iPads. Apple has asked a federal judge to dismiss the lawsuit.

What about tech industry mergers and acquisitions?

The Biden administration tried and failed to block numerous tech deals, including Meta’s purchase of a small virtual reality start-up, Within. The push to stop acquisitions outraged investors who back small companies that want to cash out by being acquired by a tech giant.

Mr. Trump’s appointees say they want to get out of the way of acquisitions that don’t present a competitive problem. Ms. Slater has expressed an openness to companies’ proposing settlements — such as selling off similar assets — which can help resolve concerns about deals.

In late January, the Justice Department sued to block the business software company Hewlett Packard Enterprise from buying Juniper Networks, a networking firm, for $14 billion. It was the first lawsuit to challenge a tech deal in Mr. Trump’s second term.

During the first Trump administration, the Justice Department unsuccessfully challenged AT&T’s purchase of Time Warner.

What does this mean for the artificial intelligence race?

Last year, the Justice Department and the F.T.C. agreed to divide up responsibility for investigating whether the biggest players in artificial intelligence were violating antitrust laws. The Justice Department started investigating Nvidia, while the F.T.C. took Microsoft and its partner, OpenAI.

It is unclear whether those investigations will result in lawsuits. The Trump administration has promised to clear the way for American companies to develop A.I., including rescinding a Biden-era executive order that put guardrails on the use of the technology.

The administration has solicited the industry’s input on how best to move forward with policy around the technology, an opening that companies and investors took to lobby for fewer rules.

“I think it is extremely important that we protect competition in the A.I. space, but I think it is equally important that the government not race to regulate A.I.,” Mr. Ferguson said on Bloomberg TV in March.

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