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After years of pushback from the Federal Trade Commission over Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, Meta has defeated the FTC’s monopoly claims.

In a Tuesday ruling, US District Judge James Boasberg said the FTC failed to show that Meta has a monopoly in a market dubbed “personal social networking.” In that narrowly defined market, the FTC unsuccessfully argued, Meta supposedly faces only two rivals, Snapchat and MeWe, which struggle to compete due to its alleged monopoly.

But the days of grouping apps into “separate markets of social networking and social media” are over, Boasberg wrote. He cited the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, who “posited that no man can ever step into the same river twice,” while telling the FTC they missed their chance to block Meta’s purchase.

Essentially, Boasberg agreed with Meta that social media—as it was known in Facebook’s early days—is dead. And that means that Meta now competes with a broader set of rival apps, which includes two hugely popular platforms: TikTok and YouTube.

Due to the UK's Online Safety Act implemented earlier this year, accessing my Bluesky DM's now means I need to allow a third-party service to scan my face, ID, or bank card. Understandably, that gives me the willies. So I can either simply never look at my messages again, whip out the likeness of Norman Reedus, OR I can log on via a VPN. However, the days of this vastly preferable third option may be numbered.

US states Wisconsin and Michigan have already proposed VPN crackdown bills aiming to close off this workaround—and the UK may be looking to follow suit. Online privacy nonprofit the Electronic Frontier Foundation recently criticised this strategy, taking aim at Wisconsin's bill in particular, saying that blocking the use of VPNs is "going to be a disaster for everyone."