Every startup story is a mosaic of choices, chances, and context. But in its lawsuit against Meta, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has adopted a sharply linear view of innovation—one where the key moment happens in 2012, when Facebook acquired Instagram, and everything before or after is a footnote. That’s a mistake. The full story of Instagram suggests something far more nuanced, and far more troubling about how American antitrust policy increasingly misunderstands innovation itself.

The FTC accuses Meta (then Facebook) of stifling competition by buying a rising rival. Instagram, founded in 2010, was acquired in 2012, after amassing 30 million users in 18 months. The agency believes that, left alone, Instagram would have become a meaningful challenger to Facebook. In the FTC’s telling, the acquisition was an act of self-preservation and therefore grounds for antitrust enforcement.

But this version of events begins halfway through the movie. A more complete story starts in 2006, when Kevin Systrom, the cofounder of Instagram, was graduating from Stanford. He declined a job offer from Facebook. Instead, he studied photography abroad, returned to the Bay Area, joined Google, and left two years later, frustrated with the pace of his career. After a brief stint at a startup, he founded a company called Burbn—an early attempt at a social check-in app.

While vacationing in Mexico, Systrom’s girlfriend declined to upload photos on Burbn because the image quality from her phone was too low. That observation sparked a realization: a good image filter could make mobile photos look beautiful. That insight became Instagram, launched with cofounder Mike Krieger in 2010.

Instagram took off—but not without strain. The company’s infrastructure was stressed. Its monetization strategy was questionable. Scaling was a serious concern. When Facebook acquired the company in 2012, it provided what Instagram lacked: capital, engineering support, and an advertising model built on relevance and reach. By 2015, Instagram had more than 400 million users, and Systrom credited Facebook with enabling that growth.

What if Systrom had taken that job at Facebook in 2006? It’s easy to imagine that same vacation, that same girlfriend, and that same photo dilemma unfolding—except the problem would have been with Facebook, not Burbn. And Systrom, trained in entrepreneurship and innovation, would have likely recognized the same gaps: poor mobile integration and a clunky photo-sharing experience. He may have tried to fix them from within. Mark Zuckerberg had identified similar problems, after all. Perhaps Systrom would have led Facebook’s transition or perhaps played a key role under others’ leadership. Either way, the innovations would have emerged.

In that scenario, Instagram—or something like it—might still have existed, but as a native feature of Facebook. And in that world, would the FTC still be calling it anticompetitive? Would regulators be trying to surgically remove Instagram from Meta, despite its deep integration and consumer popularity? Unlikely.

That’s the paradox. The FTC’s case is less about competition and more about the path by which innovation reached consumers. If it happened through internal development, it’s fine. If it happened through acquisition, it’s suspect. Yet both paths are essential to innovation. Most founders can’t build billion-dollar companies—they want to create and, often, partner with firms that can scale the products they love.

This raises a more fundamental question: What kind of innovation culture does the U.S. want to support? One in which regulators retrospectively decide whether a startup was “too promising” to be acquired? Or one where founders are free to sell to firms that can bring their visions to reality?

There are political undercurrents too. Meta is a polarizing company. Some on the left blame it for enabling misinformation; some on the right see it as hostile to conservative voices. But antitrust law isn’t meant to mediate our feelings about political foes. It’s meant to protect consumers.

The story of Instagram isn’t just about one acquisition. It’s about how we understand innovation, risk, and growth in a digital economy. If Systrom had made a different choice in 2006, we might still have an Instagram today. But we probably wouldn’t have a lawsuit.