11 ms·

This is not Meta demanding to see some privilege information that exists in Simula's drawers, but rather commandeering the entire competing organization to do m

by dsign 4y ago

This is not Meta demanding to see some privilege information that exists in Simula's drawers, but rather commandeering the entire competing organization to do market research for Meta. It is clever and evil, and nothing anybody says after this will make me think that Meta is not anti-competitive nor that they have an once of ethics. As a consumer, I doubt I will ever again consider their VR products; I rather give my money to Satan, or even Google.

kordlessagain 4y ago
This. I will never give money to Meta for anything.
JeezusJuiceTPR 4y ago
I don’t really know the rules of evidence, but I don’t think this is coming directly from Meta, nor that they’re allowed to review these documents themselves. The subpoena has to come from the court, and so I imagine it’s the court reviewing the documents, not Meta. I sure hope that’s how it works. I’d love for a lawyer to chime in, though.
- jjulius 4y ago
  IANAL, but I would imagine that at the very least, Meta's lawyers would need to be able to see the documentation so that they can adequately prepare their argument/defense.
- cldellow 4y ago
  ? It is literally coming from Meta. That's what the subpoena and court filings that are screenshotted on that page show. Meta sought the subpoena, the court granted it, and now Simula has to testify at a deposition where the questions will be asked by Meta. And... it sort of has to work this way? It's not the job of the court to do Meta or FTC's advocacy for them.
  - greensoap 4y ago
    Federal Courts don't usually grant a subpoena. Notably, the notice of third-party subpoeonas from this case wasn't even filed in the case. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/64436614/federal-trade-commission-v-meta-platforms-inc/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/64436614/federal-trade-... Rather a lawyer that is admitted to the case uses his power as a representative to serve a subpoena. These are usually NOT reviewed by the judge or court first. The person receiving a subpoena can ask the court to quash the subpoena (basically void or modify the subpoena) if they believe the subpoena is inappropriate, unduly burdensome, or whatever else.
    - Animats 4y ago
      > quash the subpoena Yes. Obviously they need a lawyer. But they should be able to get this quashed. At least narrowed and moved somewhere more convenient.
unnouinceput 4y ago
> I rather give my money to Satan, or even Google< I giggled. When you go from "don't be evil" to this, you know you fucked up big time. This has to be the tagline of the decade in regards to Google ("Google!, the boss of Satan", hi hi hi).
- Bloedcoin 4y ago
  Why? Google still provides android, Google maps, Gmail for free. World changing at it's time still helping people around the globe. Their research blog is fantastic and shows what they value. Google Io focus on people and security and trust. Google is much further away from evil than plenty of other companies. Did they kill stadia? Yes. Did actually anyone care? No. Because stadia didn't matter anyway.
  - sbarre 4y ago
    If you think Google's biggest sin is killing Stadia, you stopped paying attention over a decade ago.
    - Bloedcoin 4y ago
      I'm following well enough. Have you checked the last Google Io? They don't hide that they collect data. Android is still open. You can't expect Google to just give you a android distribution without their stuff for free just because. You still can use it.
      - alasdair_ 4y ago
        >They don't hide that they collect data. They have a mode in Chrome called "incognito mode" that, to the average person, strongly implies it doesn't collect data, yet of course it does.
        tpxl 4y ago
        Citation needed. It says what it does right there when you open it, and collecting data _and sending it to google_ would be pretty damn weird in incognito mode. You're not invisible to websites, ISPs, ... and it says so right on the page.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
time_to_smile 4y ago
> nor that they have an once of ethics It still find it odd that people think large corporations actively engage in ethics in any other capacity than for PR and manipulating public opinion. I have never in my life seen anything other than the smallest of private companies make a decision based on "ethical" reasons where there was a competing financial reason. Can you recall, over your entire career, where a product decision was made for ethical (rather than purely PR or legal) reasons? I have witness several companies where bringing up ethical concerns about company behavior ultimately leads to termination. The most obvious example of this non-ethical nature of corporations is record companies bringing up the "unethical" behavior of piracy. It's not like the heads of these companies had a big ethics meeting and decided "hey piracy is not ethical, we need to fight it!" or otherwise they would have also been like "and... next on the agenda is the unethical profiting of black musicians in the 50s and 60s, we should start cutting some checks now since that was clearly wrong." Ethics is a social construction, created by participants in a society, as a way of organizing and regulating behavior. Ethics is subtle, flexible and perpetually evolving. We as a collective can develop and evolve our ethics overtime, but the essential part is that everyone is playing the same game. Corporations are not playing the game at all, "ethics" from the view of a corporate entity is just another tool they can use to manipulate public opinion, but they don't participate in the ethics game. The problem is that they participating in society in an asymmetric way. They want everyone else to adhere to an ethical system when interacting with them, but consider themself completely outside the realm of ethics. When normal humans decide that they do not want to participate in the ethics game there are consequences ranging from mild chastisement to complete estrangement from society depending on the degree one individual refuses to participate in the ethical system of the larger society. This is not to say corporations are evil, but that are absolutely amoral in that they are not participating the moral and ethical game. Bears are amoral in the same way. We don't expect bears to make ethical decisions, but when they habitually violate the ethical code of the humans they interact with, they are usually put down as a threat to society.
- sophrocyne 4y ago
  > Can you recall, over your entire career, where a product decision was made for ethical (rather than purely PR or legal) reasons? Yes, because I made them. As a nation built on capitalism, it is those who are able to influence the decisions of corporations that bear the burden and responsibility of the decisions made by those corporations. Whether those individuals are held accountable or not is irrelevant to the fact that ethics certainly ought to be considered for any individual involved who believes themselves to be "acting ethically". I've worked hard in my career to get a seat at the table where those decisions are made because I recognize that is a place where good can be done, at scale. We should hold ourselves, and capitalism, to higher standards. And for those of us who are leaders, whether that is a small start-up or a major conglomerate, we are responsible for creating an environment where ethical decisions can be made.
TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
This is a subpoena from a legal team, NOT a court. You are free to write “we don’t know” for much of the questions or even write “too burdensome to answer”. Such subpoenas have little teeth. Hire a lawyer for a few hours to confirm what I say since I’m some random internet guy.
- M4v3R 4y ago
  From the article: We've also been commanded to drop everything we're doing and go tesify on these matters _in person_, thousands of miles away from us, by the stated deadline :| So it's not just a matter of writing "we don't know". They have to produce a lot of material and then travel 1000's of miles to show up in the court in person.
  - the_lonely_road 4y ago
    These specific people are being compelled to do that or the company is being compelled to show up in person? Those are wildly different demands. I find it hard to believe that specific productive employees of the company are being compelled to show up in court rather just some hired legal representatives of the company.
    - ncallaway 4y ago
      Right, but hiring a legal representative is going to be very expensive for a small organization. It’s not just the few hours they’ll be testifying, or giving deposition. A reasonable corporate representative is going to need to do quite a bit of prep work and review of relevant materials. So, that’s both a legal cost, and a productivity cost for whoever is collecting those documents and briefing the corporate representative. “Just some hired legal representatives” hides quite a bit of cost.
      - kanetw 4y ago
        Yep. It's easily going to be in the 5 digits.
onepointsixC 4y ago
This seems like a wildly emotional response that is completely out of line with what is being asked. The FTC is suing Meta, and it has a right to get other companies to admit that they are in fact competitors to Meta in the VR Space. SimulaVR is being pretty bad faith in claiming that: "Meta sells reasonably good gaming headsets to customers who want to be entertained in VR; we're selling general-purpose productivity devices which are aimed at replacing PCs" Meta pretty clearly intends to compete not just in the gaming VR space but to have general purpose and professional use VR Headsets. Likely all that will come from this is a few internal graphs which include Meta as a competitor in the space.
- lostmsu 4y ago
  The latter is a different target market though.
- mlyle 4y ago
  > SimulaVR is being pretty bad faith in claiming that:... > Meta pretty clearly intends to compete not just in the gaming VR space but to have general purpose and professional use VR Headsets. Likely all that will come from this is a few internal graphs which include Meta as a competitor in the space. Part of the antitrust action is determining the boundaries of the market. If company A has a monopoly in market X, and company B competes in related market Y, ... the fact that company A intends to enter market Y does not mean company B is preventing company A from having a monopoly in market X. (But if X and Y are the same market, they are!)
  - whimsicalism 4y ago
    Right, so you can imagine this evidence would be useful to Meta if the boundaries were drawn differently than how you are imagining.
    - mlyle 4y ago
      At the same time, you can imagine that SimulaVR wants to assert "we are not proof META isn't a monopoly". Further, they probably don't want to provide key market information that could aid an aggressive monopolist from leveraging their way into SimulaVR's space.
Ajedi32 4y ago
Eyeroll. Meta did nothing wrong here. This isn't them going after their competition; they're the defendant in this lawsuit. As the article says: > In fairness to Meta: the FTC is the one who initiated this fight, leaving them with the burden of demonstrating it isn't behaving "anti-competitively". So naturally, one of the primary (only?) things Meta can do to demonstrate this is to subpoena...well...its competition...to demand documents which might help them in court To the extent that you have a problem with the subpoena, blame the judge who authorized it, or perhaps the legal system that makes such subpoenas possible. Meta is not the aggressor here.
- HillRat 4y ago
  Facebook is very much the aggressor -- in response to the FTC suit, their immediate response was to try and use the courts to strong-arm hundreds of competitors into giving up massive troves of highly sensitive commercial secrets without any kind of formal protection, such as limiting document review to FB's outside counsel. It's ridiculous, it's abusive, it's overbroad, and it's transparently an effort to burden Facebook's competitors while snowing the FTC with massive amounts of paper.
  - Ajedi32 4y ago
    What would you have had them do instead? Again: > naturally, one of the primary (only?) things Meta can do to demonstrate this is to subpoena...well...its competition...to demand documents which might help them in court
    - midislack 4y ago
      They don't have a right to see secret documents other people have. We'll see.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
  - tiahura 4y ago
benreesman 4y ago
As modern capitalism goes, Meta is not on the low end of the scale WRT whatever we're calling ethical in a system that has legal penalties for leaving money on the table. It's a ruthless, profit-drive, shareholder-owned, S&P 500-dominating company like all the rest, so you get all of that into the mix. It's not a particularly flattering group to be in if you're big into modern northern european social-good democracy. But the idea that Meta is like, worse than the sovereign wealth fund in Riyadh that YC routinely connects founders with, or worse than Exxon, or worse than the pharma cartels, or? I could go on. That's just silly now, come on.
bonestamp2 4y ago
> I doubt I will ever again consider their VR products I made this mistake and ordered an Oculus earlier this year. While I waited for it to arrive, I setup a facebook/meta account since that is a requirement. Before the headset arrived, Meta had flagged my account as fake, and the process to prove that I was in fact a real person would not accept my cell phone number. There was nothing else I could do to prove I was real. So, fake me returned the headset when it arrived, and then fake me felt a sense of relief in the giant bullet I had just dodged.
moomin 4y ago
It’s definitely a heel move. I also fail to see how a small unprofitable firm (like most startups) is evidence of competition.
- jamiequint 4y ago
  WhatsApp was a small unprofitable firm before they got bought for $18bn
  - moomin 4y ago
    Unprofitable, maybe.
bobse 4y ago
It's easy. Never give money to Americans.
- CrazyPyroLinux 4y ago
  Americans? What did we do to you? (Besides the regime-change and proxy wars, and blowing up that pipeline - Sorry about all that.)
mkmk3 4y ago
I'm not against having Simula foot the bill in preparing whatever materials they may need to prepare to aid in the FCC's investigation - I think that's a reasonable cost of doing business, one that ought to scale with the size of the company, no? However, I agree that there may be valuable information you'd rather your competitor not have access to at your expense. Is there instances of, or analogues in other domains, of information relevant to the persecution of one party, belonging to another party, being reviewed in confidence by a third party? Or failing to find a fair solution in terms of that approach, how much can that information be trimmed?

by dsign 4y ago

kordlessagain 4y ago

This. I will never give money to Meta for anything.

JeezusJuiceTPR 4y ago

I don’t really know the rules of evidence, but I don’t think this is coming directly from Meta, nor that they’re allowed to review these documents themselves. The subpoena has to come from the court, and so I imagine it’s the court reviewing the documents, not Meta. I sure hope that’s how it works. I’d love for a lawyer to chime in, though.

jjulius 4y ago
IANAL, but I would imagine that at the very least, Meta's lawyers would need to be able to see the documentation so that they can adequately prepare their argument/defense.
cldellow 4y ago
? It is literally coming from Meta. That's what the subpoena and court filings that are screenshotted on that page show. Meta sought the subpoena, the court granted it, and now Simula has to testify at a deposition where the questions will be asked by Meta. And... it sort of has to work this way? It's not the job of the court to do Meta or FTC's advocacy for them.
- greensoap 4y ago
  Federal Courts don't usually grant a subpoena. Notably, the notice of third-party subpoeonas from this case wasn't even filed in the case. https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/64436614/federal-trade-commission-v-meta-platforms-inc/ https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/64436614/federal-trade-... Rather a lawyer that is admitted to the case uses his power as a representative to serve a subpoena. These are usually NOT reviewed by the judge or court first. The person receiving a subpoena can ask the court to quash the subpoena (basically void or modify the subpoena) if they believe the subpoena is inappropriate, unduly burdensome, or whatever else.
  - Animats 4y ago
    > quash the subpoena Yes. Obviously they need a lawyer. But they should be able to get this quashed. At least narrowed and moved somewhere more convenient.

unnouinceput 4y ago

> I rather give my money to Satan, or even Google< I giggled. When you go from "don't be evil" to this, you know you fucked up big time. This has to be the tagline of the decade in regards to Google ("Google!, the boss of Satan", hi hi hi).

Bloedcoin 4y ago
Why? Google still provides android, Google maps, Gmail for free. World changing at it's time still helping people around the globe. Their research blog is fantastic and shows what they value. Google Io focus on people and security and trust. Google is much further away from evil than plenty of other companies. Did they kill stadia? Yes. Did actually anyone care? No. Because stadia didn't matter anyway.
- sbarre 4y ago
  If you think Google's biggest sin is killing Stadia, you stopped paying attention over a decade ago.
  - Bloedcoin 4y ago
    I'm following well enough. Have you checked the last Google Io? They don't hide that they collect data. Android is still open. You can't expect Google to just give you a android distribution without their stuff for free just because. You still can use it.
    - alasdair_ 4y ago
      >They don't hide that they collect data. They have a mode in Chrome called "incognito mode" that, to the average person, strongly implies it doesn't collect data, yet of course it does.
      - tpxl 4y ago
        Citation needed. It says what it does right there when you open it, and collecting data _and sending it to google_ would be pretty damn weird in incognito mode. You're not invisible to websites, ISPs, ... and it says so right on the page.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

time_to_smile 4y ago

> nor that they have an once of ethics It still find it odd that people think large corporations actively engage in ethics in any other capacity than for PR and manipulating public opinion. I have never in my life seen anything other than the smallest of private companies make a decision based on "ethical" reasons where there was a competing financial reason. Can you recall, over your entire career, where a product decision was made for ethical (rather than purely PR or legal) reasons? I have witness several companies where bringing up ethical concerns about company behavior ultimately leads to termination. The most obvious example of this non-ethical nature of corporations is record companies bringing up the "unethical" behavior of piracy. It's not like the heads of these companies had a big ethics meeting and decided "hey piracy is not ethical, we need to fight it!" or otherwise they would have also been like "and... next on the agenda is the unethical profiting of black musicians in the 50s and 60s, we should start cutting some checks now since that was clearly wrong." Ethics is a social construction, created by participants in a society, as a way of organizing and regulating behavior. Ethics is subtle, flexible and perpetually evolving. We as a collective can develop and evolve our ethics overtime, but the essential part is that everyone is playing the same game. Corporations are not playing the game at all, "ethics" from the view of a corporate entity is just another tool they can use to manipulate public opinion, but they don't participate in the ethics game. The problem is that they participating in society in an asymmetric way. They want everyone else to adhere to an ethical system when interacting with them, but consider themself completely outside the realm of ethics. When normal humans decide that they do not want to participate in the ethics game there are consequences ranging from mild chastisement to complete estrangement from society depending on the degree one individual refuses to participate in the ethical system of the larger society. This is not to say corporations are evil, but that are absolutely amoral in that they are not participating the moral and ethical game. Bears are amoral in the same way. We don't expect bears to make ethical decisions, but when they habitually violate the ethical code of the humans they interact with, they are usually put down as a threat to society.

sophrocyne 4y ago
> Can you recall, over your entire career, where a product decision was made for ethical (rather than purely PR or legal) reasons? Yes, because I made them. As a nation built on capitalism, it is those who are able to influence the decisions of corporations that bear the burden and responsibility of the decisions made by those corporations. Whether those individuals are held accountable or not is irrelevant to the fact that ethics certainly ought to be considered for any individual involved who believes themselves to be "acting ethically". I've worked hard in my career to get a seat at the table where those decisions are made because I recognize that is a place where good can be done, at scale. We should hold ourselves, and capitalism, to higher standards. And for those of us who are leaders, whether that is a small start-up or a major conglomerate, we are responsible for creating an environment where ethical decisions can be made.

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago

This is a subpoena from a legal team, NOT a court. You are free to write “we don’t know” for much of the questions or even write “too burdensome to answer”. Such subpoenas have little teeth. Hire a lawyer for a few hours to confirm what I say since I’m some random internet guy.

M4v3R 4y ago
From the article: We've also been commanded to drop everything we're doing and go tesify on these matters _in person_, thousands of miles away from us, by the stated deadline :| So it's not just a matter of writing "we don't know". They have to produce a lot of material and then travel 1000's of miles to show up in the court in person.
- the_lonely_road 4y ago
  These specific people are being compelled to do that or the company is being compelled to show up in person? Those are wildly different demands. I find it hard to believe that specific productive employees of the company are being compelled to show up in court rather just some hired legal representatives of the company.
  - ncallaway 4y ago
    Right, but hiring a legal representative is going to be very expensive for a small organization. It’s not just the few hours they’ll be testifying, or giving deposition. A reasonable corporate representative is going to need to do quite a bit of prep work and review of relevant materials. So, that’s both a legal cost, and a productivity cost for whoever is collecting those documents and briefing the corporate representative. “Just some hired legal representatives” hides quite a bit of cost.
    - kanetw 4y ago
      Yep. It's easily going to be in the 5 digits.

onepointsixC 4y ago

This seems like a wildly emotional response that is completely out of line with what is being asked. The FTC is suing Meta, and it has a right to get other companies to admit that they are in fact competitors to Meta in the VR Space. SimulaVR is being pretty bad faith in claiming that: "Meta sells reasonably good gaming headsets to customers who want to be entertained in VR; we're selling general-purpose productivity devices which are aimed at replacing PCs" Meta pretty clearly intends to compete not just in the gaming VR space but to have general purpose and professional use VR Headsets. Likely all that will come from this is a few internal graphs which include Meta as a competitor in the space.

lostmsu 4y ago
The latter is a different target market though.
mlyle 4y ago
> SimulaVR is being pretty bad faith in claiming that:... > Meta pretty clearly intends to compete not just in the gaming VR space but to have general purpose and professional use VR Headsets. Likely all that will come from this is a few internal graphs which include Meta as a competitor in the space. Part of the antitrust action is determining the boundaries of the market. If company A has a monopoly in market X, and company B competes in related market Y, ... the fact that company A intends to enter market Y does not mean company B is preventing company A from having a monopoly in market X. (But if X and Y are the same market, they are!)
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  Right, so you can imagine this evidence would be useful to Meta if the boundaries were drawn differently than how you are imagining.
  - mlyle 4y ago
    At the same time, you can imagine that SimulaVR wants to assert "we are not proof META isn't a monopoly". Further, they probably don't want to provide key market information that could aid an aggressive monopolist from leveraging their way into SimulaVR's space.

Ajedi32 4y ago

Eyeroll. Meta did nothing wrong here. This isn't them going after their competition; they're the defendant in this lawsuit. As the article says: > In fairness to Meta: the FTC is the one who initiated this fight, leaving them with the burden of demonstrating it isn't behaving "anti-competitively". So naturally, one of the primary (only?) things Meta can do to demonstrate this is to subpoena...well...its competition...to demand documents which might help them in court To the extent that you have a problem with the subpoena, blame the judge who authorized it, or perhaps the legal system that makes such subpoenas possible. Meta is not the aggressor here.

HillRat 4y ago
Facebook is very much the aggressor -- in response to the FTC suit, their immediate response was to try and use the courts to strong-arm hundreds of competitors into giving up massive troves of highly sensitive commercial secrets without any kind of formal protection, such as limiting document review to FB's outside counsel. It's ridiculous, it's abusive, it's overbroad, and it's transparently an effort to burden Facebook's competitors while snowing the FTC with massive amounts of paper.
- Ajedi32 4y ago
  What would you have had them do instead? Again: > naturally, one of the primary (only?) things Meta can do to demonstrate this is to subpoena...well...its competition...to demand documents which might help them in court
  - midislack 4y ago
    They don't have a right to see secret documents other people have. We'll see.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
- tiahura 4y ago

benreesman 4y ago

As modern capitalism goes, Meta is not on the low end of the scale WRT whatever we're calling ethical in a system that has legal penalties for leaving money on the table. It's a ruthless, profit-drive, shareholder-owned, S&P 500-dominating company like all the rest, so you get all of that into the mix. It's not a particularly flattering group to be in if you're big into modern northern european social-good democracy. But the idea that Meta is like, worse than the sovereign wealth fund in Riyadh that YC routinely connects founders with, or worse than Exxon, or worse than the pharma cartels, or? I could go on. That's just silly now, come on.

bonestamp2 4y ago

> I doubt I will ever again consider their VR products I made this mistake and ordered an Oculus earlier this year. While I waited for it to arrive, I setup a facebook/meta account since that is a requirement. Before the headset arrived, Meta had flagged my account as fake, and the process to prove that I was in fact a real person would not accept my cell phone number. There was nothing else I could do to prove I was real. So, fake me returned the headset when it arrived, and then fake me felt a sense of relief in the giant bullet I had just dodged.

moomin 4y ago

It’s definitely a heel move. I also fail to see how a small unprofitable firm (like most startups) is evidence of competition.

jamiequint 4y ago
WhatsApp was a small unprofitable firm before they got bought for $18bn
- moomin 4y ago
  Unprofitable, maybe.

bobse 4y ago

It's easy. Never give money to Americans.

CrazyPyroLinux 4y ago
Americans? What did we do to you? (Besides the regime-change and proxy wars, and blowing up that pipeline - Sorry about all that.)

mkmk3 4y ago

I'm not against having Simula foot the bill in preparing whatever materials they may need to prepare to aid in the FCC's investigation - I think that's a reasonable cost of doing business, one that ought to scale with the size of the company, no? However, I agree that there may be valuable information you'd rather your competitor not have access to at your expense. Is there instances of, or analogues in other domains, of information relevant to the persecution of one party, belonging to another party, being reviewed in confidence by a third party? Or failing to find a fair solution in terms of that approach, how much can that information be trimmed?