13 ms·

Meta antitrust trial kicks off in federal court

431 points by c420 2y ago

yard2010 2y ago
Lock em up for good. For everyone's sake.
dang 2y ago
Other articles posted about this: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/technology/meta-antitrust-trial-ftc.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/technology/meta-antitrust... (https://archive.ph/8wOPP https://archive.ph/8wOPP) https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/14/media/meta-ftc-trial/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/14/media/meta-ftc-trial/index.ht... https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/13/meta-zuckerberg-ftc-washington-court-00288044 https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/13/meta-zuckerberg-ftc... (I've omitted the HN links this time because there weren't any comments yet. Someday we're going to do proper URL bundling and karma sharing for cases like this, where multiple submitters post good articles on the same underlying story.)
- iambateman 2y ago
  Karma sharing would be huge. That's a great idea and I think would increase the overall quality of links a lot. At least worth a shot.
  - thierrydamiba 2y ago
    This is a pretty fun link: https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders The leaderboard system is interesting because they don’t actually show numbers for the top 10(to de-incentivize farming battles I assume). If you look at the top profile, tptacek, you can see they have a little over 400k karma and they are active(posted two days ago). Thanks to Thomas people like him who make this site fun!
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luminadiffusion 2y ago
Zuck waved the white flag, settled the frivolous Trump libel lawsuit, and made several trips to kiss Trump's ring - now he is getting skewered anyhow. Deliciously ironic. “Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.” ― Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment.
- deleted 2y ago
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- hnlmorg 2y ago
  I wouldn’t write off a leniency due to their aforementioned arse kissing. A trial doesn’t mean a they’ll be found guilty, let alone given any tangible consequences.
  - ocdtrekkie 2y ago
    The DOJ has continued to indicate it intends to require Google spin off Chrome and obviously the tariff game has done no favors to Apple. Giving Trump money appears to be a game for suckers.
    - stevenwoo 2y ago
      Those who were in prison and paid for a pardon got their money's worth. No take backsies on those. The one grifter was released from paying back millions to the people he defrauded - he made money by paying Trump if looked at as simple arithmetic. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/donald-trump-pardons-nikola-founder-trevor-milton-on-fraud-conviction/ar-AA1BR9vK https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/donald-trump-pardons-ni...
      - ocdtrekkie 2y ago
        Too bad Joe Exotic doesn't have enough money I guess...
    - KerrAvon 2y ago
      Yeah, for reasons I still don’t understand — probably because it’s driven by Peter Thiel’s Deep Incel Thoughts — JD Vance and co. were big fans of Lina Khan’s FTC antitrust moves during the Biden administration.
alex1138 2y ago
I think Whatsapp is the clearest possible case that can be made of any company? They violated the condition of not sharing user data with Facebook Willing to listen to other opinions on other companies, but surely Whatsapp
- changoplatanero 2y ago
  That was a voluntary pledge the company made to the users, right? It wasn't a legally binding commitment that there would never ever be any data sharing.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
    Dear Users, in our Terms of Service, we tell you that we won't share your data. Psych, it wasn't legally binding.
    - fallingknife 2y ago
      Correct. A promise is not legally binding unless there is some sort of payment in return. The exception is if you can prove you suffered monetary damages from relying on that promise, which is basically impossible for data sharing.
      - lovich 2y ago
        I can't sell my data to willing buyers for the same price anymore, because Meta illegally shared my data which reduced its value, and that's on top of the lost revenue I could have made selling my data to Meta if I was whatsapp only user. Oh wait, I forgot those arguments only apply when companies are getting the government to go after people sharing files
      - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > promise is not legally binding unless there is some sort of payment in return If I recall correctly, I gave them a worldwide, perpetual license to some data. > if you can prove you suffered monetary damages This is a separate question (that of calculating damages) from that of whether there was a breach per se.
henryfjordan 2y ago
> "The FTC's lawsuit against Meta defies reality. The evidence at trial will show what every 17-year-old in the world knows: Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp compete with Chinese-owned TikTok, YouTube, X, iMessage and many others," Meta spokesperson Chris Sgro said in a statement. Everyone knew at the time that Facebook bought Instagram because it threatened Facebook's dominance, and hindsight shows that exactly that happened. There's a huge swath of people that dropped off FB and now use Insta, but Meta owns both. It was a great move but it was absolutely anti-competitive at the time.
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
  Now the real thing that has to be seen is whether Mark Zuckerberg is "masculine" enough to escape from "the matrix".
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  They're also directly behind some of the anti-TikTok push; again, trying to kneecap their competition. https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/report-facebook-hired-pr-firm-to-smear-tiktok/ https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/report-facebook-hi...
  - wikipedia 2y ago
    Over the last ~3 years I've been passively following the negative PR campaign against TT by Meta; a lot of the outrage felt a bit manufactured, specifically the outlandish claims like the 'slap a teacher challenge' which, upon investigation, didn't actually exist [0] [0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/slap-a-teacher-tiktok-challenge-hoax/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/slap-a-teacher-tiktok-challe... https://archive.ph/ERLFo https://archive.ph/ERLFo - Facebook paid Targeted Victory, a PR firm, to malign TikTok https://archive.ph/wYuvL https://archive.ph/wYuvL - A whistleblower’s power: Key takeaways from the Facebook Papers https://archive.ph/rWDA4 https://archive.ph/rWDA4 - Mark Zuckerberg says TikTok is a threat to democracy, but didn't say he spent 6 months trying to buy its predecessor https://archive.ph/H8SIk https://archive.ph/H8SIk - Before Mark Zuckerberg Tried To Kill TikTok, He Wanted To Own It https://archive.ph/liFKi https://archive.ph/liFKi - FACEBOOK’S PLAYBOOK TO BEAT COMPETITORS HAS HAD TO CHANGE WITH TIKTOK https://archive.ph/9XSqi https://archive.ph/9XSqi - Facebook Tries to Take Down TikTok https://archive.ph/LWTHf https://archive.ph/LWTHf - Reuters: Factbox: Facebook and TikTok's fraught history - quick look https://archive.ph/H3dfJ https://archive.ph/H3dfJ - Facebook Parent Company Defends Its PR Campaign to Portray TikTok as Threat to American Children
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paxys 2y ago
I don't understand the FTC's strategy here. Their entire case hinges on the fact that the judge will accept that Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat and MeWe (?) are direct competitors of Facebook in the "personal social networking" space while TikTok, YouTube, X, iMessage and all the rest aren't. Unsurprisingly that is what Meta's legal team is spending all of its efforts debating. I really can't see the judge allowing such a cherry-picked definition of what Facebook's market is.
- scialex 2y ago
  I mean it's not much more unreasonable then the argument that iphones and android phones don't compete but courts bought that.
  - granzymes 2y ago
    A court didn’t buy that: the district court and 9th Circuit both held that iOS and Android compete in the Epic v. Apple case. A jury however found that the relevant market in the Epic v. Google case was just Android. Google is understandably appealing that to the 9th Circuit.
- whatshisface 2y ago
  The definition of a trust isn't a business with no competitors. In fact, a business with no competitors is legal. Antitrust law limits "anti-competitive actions," which are possible even for commodity producers in an efficient market.
  - the_clarence 2y ago
    Exactly! So what is anti competitive here?
    - karaterobot 2y ago
      The government has alleged that Meta's acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram was done to reduce competition. Nothing has been established as anti-competitive or not yet, that's why it's in court. Evidence from both sides will be presented. I'm not sure how else to answer that question.
iambateman 2y ago
> Meta could have chosen to compete with then-upstart photo sharing app Instagram in 2012, a senior FTC official said on a call with reporters ahead of the trial, but instead it bought it, and did the same with WhatsApp. This has a potentially very-chilling effect on acquisitions, which are a major source of liquidity for lots of secondary companies.
- zombiwoof 2y ago
  Maybe these companies should be built to last not be acquired into monolithic borgs
  - lenerdenator 2y ago
    But then they'd have to compete and not just shovel more money into the pockets of major individual shareholders, along with the retirement and pension funds of a generation that needs to drastically scale back its post-career ambitions.
    - deleted 2y ago
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- teeklp 2y ago
  [dead]
- huitzitziltzin 2y ago
  The large tech firms get a surprisingly large amount of hate on antitrust issues on this website for startups so I appreciate your point bc I think it’s often missed.
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    It's almost as if people want to create companies that satisfy somebody's need, instead of pretending to be large so it gets brought...
  - deleted 2y ago
skizm 2y ago
What's the point of getting FTC approval of an acquisition in the first place if they can just go back a decade later and undo it?
- lenerdenator 2y ago
  That's just the concept of judicial review.
- colonwqbang 2y ago
  They can’t just undo it but they can challenge it in court. But you are right, in a way the FTC is appealing their own decision [1]. US politics can be quite mad at times. [1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2012/08/ftc-closes-its-investigation-facebooks-proposed-acquisition-instagram-photo-sharing-program https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2012/08/...
  - jrapdx3 2y ago
    > "US politics can be quite mad at times." No question about the truth of that statement. However, though the FTC approved the acquisition 10 years ago, the current FTC commissioners have evidently concluded that in the interim things have changed. Whether the court agrees with the FTC's logic remains to be seen.
- inquirerGeneral 2y ago
  [dead]
- kmeisthax 2y ago
  Conversely: if Facebook lies their ass off to the FTC to get their mergers approved, why should we accept those lies as immutable truth?
  - skizm 2y ago
    Is that what the FTC is claiming happened?
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vaxman 2y ago
https://youtu.be/cvVBY4QuA5w https://youtu.be/cvVBY4QuA5w I hope Mark issues a public statement that he is dropping his emergency arbitration against her and will allow her book to Publish. I get why he did it, but it didn't work and now it is hurting more than helping. There is no such thing as Bad PR --but an open wound is a different story. (I am on his side in that I don't neurotically hold people accountable for being dbags back in their 20s and early 30s when they aren't that person anymore...google for "brain development at 30" to see why.) PS: Was at a startup that was wiped out by Instagram 4.3. This was after Mr. SnapEgo reportedly turned down a cool $1B and McAfee's lost son snapped up the technically troubled Vine (that Mr. FootInHisMouth should probably retool and rebrand as "X Prime").
- alex1138 2y ago
  Mr. SnapEgo referring to Zuckerberg?
  - vaxman 2y ago
    no
- matthewdgreen 2y ago
  Lots of people behave stupidly in their early 20s, and then grow out of it later in life. But the key is: they have to grow out of it. I'm not convinced this is true of Zuck.
  - goldchainposse 2y ago
    Between his fashion accessories and Joe Rogan appearance, I'm convinced he hasn't. Five years ago, Cheryl Sandberg would call him on it. Today, he's surrounded by yes men.
  - vaxman 2y ago
    It's biological https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-47622059 https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-47622059 (mankind didn't know this until the relatively recent advent of "live" brain imaging). Something similar happened with SJobs and today people deify him. Seriously though, Billy was a FB investor (in addition to apparently being a Sith Lord who may have seen an Anakin-echo in youngling Zuck) and it's assumed he didExert influence during the dark period. It must have been intense for Zuck. Can only hope such influence faded with the Epstein scandal, but it's too late for Mark to stay in control of Meta now anyway, unfortunately you have to take the Bad with the Good. Mark's problem now is he's too young to retire and he really, it's not like he can spin-off with Reality Labs and keep going on the Orion stuff --without leadership, that market isLost to Apple now (though Apple's entire C-suite is aging out and since Elon is not available anymore..heh yeah: Zuck, the next CEO of AAPL --halfway callin' it.)
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jmyeet 2y ago
So there are two things you should always bear in mind about any action taken by the current administration: 1. Everything is for sale. Any laws, tariffs, regulations, etc that negatively affect your interests can be bought off. Pardons can be sold. Thanks for the Supreme Court, there is absolutely nothing illegal about the President doing this anymore; and 2. The courts are used to bend individuals and companies to the policy and personal interests of the president. Take Eric Adams's corruption case. The DoJ wanted to dismiss the case without prejudice so it could be re-filed. This threat of future prosecution was the point to keep Adams in line. The courts saw through this thinly-veiled influence peddling and dismissed the case with prejudice. So Meta is being forced to kiss the ring. That means silencing content critical of the administration and allowing right-wing conspiracies and hate speech to spread unfettered. I expect nothing to come of this because these cases all take a decade or more to filter through various appeals, remands back to the trial court, further appeals and so on. But it will absolutely influence how Meta's recommendation algorithms work.
- arrosenberg 2y ago
  I don't explicitly disagree with anything you wrote, but this action was brought by the Biden administration (technically they re-filed because the judge had thrown the original case out, which was filed during Trump's lame duck period). Half of Trump's support comes from populists, so the FTC has chosen to continue the prosecution.
droningparrot 2y ago
I just want to be able to message people on Instagram without getting sucked into reels
snovymgodym 2y ago
I do not understand what leg the FTC has to stand on in this case at all. I know the company is quite unpopular, but from an objective legal standpoint I don't see how you can make an antitrust/anticompetitive argument here.
- charonn0 2y ago
  They don't need to be a literal monopoly to be guilty of anti-competitive practices.
  - granzymes 2y ago
    FTC does in fact need to show (directly or through indirect evidence) that Meta has monopoly power in a relevant market and that it abused that power in order to win a Section 2 case. If the relevant market ends up including TikTok or YouTube, FTC will be unable to make that showing.
busymom0 2y ago
Not a fan of Meta and I don't have IG, Facebook, WhatsApp etc. However, even in 2012 or so when these acquisitions happened, Snapchat was a much bigger thing. And for me, Reddit was a much bigger thing than FB. I think amongst the antitrust trials, this one is the weakest.
- BrtByte 2y ago
  Fair take, but I think the key distinction is why Instagram and WhatsApp were targeted specifically
zeroonetwothree 2y ago
I feel the spirit of antitrust being for the benefit of consumers has been lost with the recent round of actions. Virtually every action a corporation takes is “anticompetitive” because surely it wants to defeat the competition. That’s the whole point of capitalism. We shouldn’t be concerned until this is actually anti consumer. And it’s hard to prove consumer harm for free products that aren’t really necessary and have many alternatives.
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NHQ 2y ago
This trial is but a showcase for the berg zucker. Legal proceedings focused on "social networks" and "browser market shares" and app stores. These are ridiculous, superficial, and meaningless. If there was really such a thing as a monopoly on social networking, you would have to kick people off the networks, not just stop the companies operating them. What would change if instagram had to become its own company again? The same people would own it. And that is why antitrust is a joke, it does not prevent the true monopoly of who controls what.
the_clarence 2y ago
What's the argument exactly? What prevents competition from starting a new social network or a new messaging app? Indeed there is a huge number of successful messaging apps (imessage, signal, telegram, wire, wechat, kakao) and social networks (tiktok, snapchat, linkedin, reddit) I know we're supposed to hate on facebook but what exactly is anti competitive?
gizmodo59 2y ago
I may be cynical but Zuck saw this happening and entirely shifted to appease current administration. Even having UFC CEO on board. No way they will breakup META.
- techpineapple 2y ago
  I dunno, maybe? But you don't even have to be cynical to observe that Mark has a lot of power, and he's an opportunist. I don't think the Repubs trust him, and do you really think that Mark has changed his stripes and doesn't try to cozy up to the next administration if he thinks there's another vibe shift? Also, it feels like that would be quite a scalp for Trump to brag about.
mrandish 2y ago
So Mark Z's recent $20M "donation" to Trump's presidential library apparently wasn't enough. This would all be much easier for everyone if there was an official rate card and price list.
- beefnugs 2y ago
  His payment will work just fine, this is to weed out all the judges that wont follow orders for purging
stackskipton 2y ago
Shout out to https://www.bigtechontrial.com/ https://www.bigtechontrial.com/ which covered Google Trial and is now covering Facebook trial. Disclaimer: Matt Stoller is big on anti monopoly so he's in support of government in both cases but overall, his coverage is really good and more details than you will probably get from other outlets.
- chalst 1y ago
  Why the disclaimer? We know that monopolies make bad platform owners.
MPSFounder 2y ago
A recent HN article shows Facebook silenced Pro Palestine posts due to Israeli interference. The issue with Meta controlling so many social media outlets is control over information. A populace that is uninformed will welcome a master (and deserves one), and will look the other way when genocides and injustice take place in our world. The audience of HN is educated and unlikely to fall for misinformation. However, I have seen firsthand how anti-immigrant sentiments, racism and anti-muslim sentiment [1] can prosper when one man controls the flow of information, for they can steer public opinion in ways that are alien to our morals (and favors either their personal politics, their bottom dollar or other nefarious reasons). This is somewhat similar to the Sinclair family running identical stories on many TV stations they control to control narratives. However, Meta has much greater reach. Their role in allowing Russian interference in US elections for ad revenue has largely been forgotten, but Zuck played a role in spreading misinformation and allowing fake users (pretending to be Americans) to steer anger in the population, and allowed a foreign entity to spend their dollars favoring an American candidate (Election meddling). Ultimately, you can argue we must check our sources, but once again, HN is a small bubble. I know firsthand from Meta engineers that Facebook does practically nothing to stop Russian and Iranian threats and is in bed with the Israelis. I hope the FTC comes for their a-- [1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
- worik 1y ago
  > A populace that is uninformed will welcome a master (and deserves one) That parenthetical addition is a bit harsh!
zombiwoof 2y ago
Everyone is missing the point: facts don’t matter What matters is: if Donald Trump wants to break up Meta just for fun, nothing can stop him and he will do it. Just for fun
1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago
https://archive.md/20250414152053/https://www.axios.com/pro/tech-policy/2025/04/14/ftc-meta-antitrust-trial-kicks-off-in-federal-court https://archive.md/20250414152053/https://www.axios.com/pro/...
jfvinueza 2y ago
What has actually changed in the last 13 years regarding Whatsapp? Video. And I believe that's the reason why anyone hasn't actually challenged them regarding messaging: you can build a similar application with similar features with a rather small group of people (not saying it's easy, but it's feasible). But handling those pentabytes of bandwith shared every day? Actually _promoting_ the use of DIY video as the preferred communication media? That's something you can't do as an small shop. And that's, I think, why you cannot compete. I decided to quit Whatsapp, which in Latinamerica is quite an outrageous move: that application is the communication channel for EVERYTHING: all families, all schools, all neighborhoods. I did it because I think Meta's main metric is actually hostile to their users: they want as much of your time as they can get from you, and they'll use are sorts of psychological weaponry to keep you inside. They were actually vocal about it in the past. There's zero reason to trust them. But why is it that no one has come up with a true alternative (although props to Signal)? Well, there's the network effect, for sure. They also employ very good engineers. But I believe the true reason is scale: it didn't use to be that way, but infrastructure costs are now inmense.
xlinux 2y ago
I wish death to meta.its destroyed whole generation.
karhuton 2y ago
As someone who’s stuck with Whatsapp and no way out (friends and family won’t switch), I dearly hope for a split. I do struggle to understand how we here casually lump tohether totally different platforms as comptetitors. It’s not like I can use Youtube or Tiktok instead of Whatsapp with my family for direct and group discussion. Even X and Instagram would be a stretch, as their raison d’être is public social media and not instant messaging. Sure the platforms have overlapping features, but you ain’t gonna use a knife insted of a spoon.
- Spivak 2y ago
  YouTube, X, and Tiktok compete with Meta's products in different verticals so it's not really a fair comparison. But at the same time WhatsApp is drowning in competition from a thousand different messengers so I'm not sure if this point really matters. Like X isn't competing with FB Marketplace but Craigslist sure is. TikTok isn't competing with FB Events but Apple Events and Eventbrite are.
  - skydhash 2y ago
    As long as WhatsApp have a strong backer like Meta, then using the term competition is meaningless. In many countries, WA is the de facto IM platform, but I can bet that it hasn't received a dim from those users. So how do they pay their developers, infrastructure, and surrounding resources?
- spacebanana7 2y ago
  Use email. Everyone has an email address and it's socially awkward for them if they don't respond. Also has all the benefits of being an open protocol rather than a corporate garden.
  - rreichman 2y ago
    using an email for chat like people use whatsapp is not practical
    - 2y ago
valeg 2y ago
This seems like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukos lite So much for Zuck's white flags and ring-kissing.
- WhyNotHugo 2y ago
  Funny how Wikipedia articles for Russian oligarchs refer to them as "oligarch", but articles for US oligarchs refers to them as "businessman".
rib3ye 2y ago
Is it really lost on people that the POTUS owns a competing social network platform?
emsign 2y ago
Another scheme of the administration to blackmail a big company into submission. I'm not against sued a big company because of antitrust/monopoly but my fear is that Meta gets off the hook once Zuck jumps through Trump's hoops and sells out the customers to the new dictator.
BrtByte 2y ago
Regardless of where you land on Meta's ethics, this case feels like a high-stakes stress test for retroactive antitrust enforcement. If the FTC succeeds here, it basically rewrites the "finality" of M&A decisions in tech... and that'll ripple way beyond Meta.
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TimPC 2y ago
I think the illegal monopoly claims are a bit out there given the range of offerings in the social network space. Are they arguing that Instagram specifically is a monopoly in photo-oriented social networking because X is mostly text and YouTube and TikTok is mostly video? I don't see any particular time you can point to where Facebook+Instagram+WhatsApp was a monoopoly in any sort of broad social networking space, especially not the WhatsApp part which competes with iMessage which is an absolute behemoth in terms of market share.
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431 points by c420 2y ago

yard2010 2y ago

Lock em up for good. For everyone's sake.

dang 2y ago

Other articles posted about this: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/technology/meta-antitrust-trial-ftc.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/technology/meta-antitrust... (https://archive.ph/8wOPP https://archive.ph/8wOPP) https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/14/media/meta-ftc-trial/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/14/media/meta-ftc-trial/index.ht... https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/13/meta-zuckerberg-ftc-washington-court-00288044 https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/13/meta-zuckerberg-ftc... (I've omitted the HN links this time because there weren't any comments yet. Someday we're going to do proper URL bundling and karma sharing for cases like this, where multiple submitters post good articles on the same underlying story.)

iambateman 2y ago
Karma sharing would be huge. That's a great idea and I think would increase the overall quality of links a lot. At least worth a shot.
- thierrydamiba 2y ago
  This is a pretty fun link: https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders The leaderboard system is interesting because they don’t actually show numbers for the top 10(to de-incentivize farming battles I assume). If you look at the top profile, tptacek, you can see they have a little over 400k karma and they are active(posted two days ago). Thanks to Thomas people like him who make this site fun!

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luminadiffusion 2y ago

Zuck waved the white flag, settled the frivolous Trump libel lawsuit, and made several trips to kiss Trump's ring - now he is getting skewered anyhow. Deliciously ironic. “Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.” ― Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment.

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hnlmorg 2y ago
I wouldn’t write off a leniency due to their aforementioned arse kissing. A trial doesn’t mean a they’ll be found guilty, let alone given any tangible consequences.
- ocdtrekkie 2y ago
  The DOJ has continued to indicate it intends to require Google spin off Chrome and obviously the tariff game has done no favors to Apple. Giving Trump money appears to be a game for suckers.
  - stevenwoo 2y ago
    Those who were in prison and paid for a pardon got their money's worth. No take backsies on those. The one grifter was released from paying back millions to the people he defrauded - he made money by paying Trump if looked at as simple arithmetic. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/donald-trump-pardons-nikola-founder-trevor-milton-on-fraud-conviction/ar-AA1BR9vK https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/donald-trump-pardons-ni...
    - ocdtrekkie 2y ago
      Too bad Joe Exotic doesn't have enough money I guess...
  - KerrAvon 2y ago
    Yeah, for reasons I still don’t understand — probably because it’s driven by Peter Thiel’s Deep Incel Thoughts — JD Vance and co. were big fans of Lina Khan’s FTC antitrust moves during the Biden administration.

alex1138 2y ago

I think Whatsapp is the clearest possible case that can be made of any company? They violated the condition of not sharing user data with Facebook Willing to listen to other opinions on other companies, but surely Whatsapp

changoplatanero 2y ago
That was a voluntary pledge the company made to the users, right? It wasn't a legally binding commitment that there would never ever be any data sharing.
- onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
  Dear Users, in our Terms of Service, we tell you that we won't share your data. Psych, it wasn't legally binding.
  - fallingknife 2y ago
    Correct. A promise is not legally binding unless there is some sort of payment in return. The exception is if you can prove you suffered monetary damages from relying on that promise, which is basically impossible for data sharing.
    - lovich 2y ago
      I can't sell my data to willing buyers for the same price anymore, because Meta illegally shared my data which reduced its value, and that's on top of the lost revenue I could have made selling my data to Meta if I was whatsapp only user. Oh wait, I forgot those arguments only apply when companies are getting the government to go after people sharing files
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > promise is not legally binding unless there is some sort of payment in return If I recall correctly, I gave them a worldwide, perpetual license to some data. > if you can prove you suffered monetary damages This is a separate question (that of calculating damages) from that of whether there was a breach per se.

henryfjordan 2y ago

> "The FTC's lawsuit against Meta defies reality. The evidence at trial will show what every 17-year-old in the world knows: Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp compete with Chinese-owned TikTok, YouTube, X, iMessage and many others," Meta spokesperson Chris Sgro said in a statement. Everyone knew at the time that Facebook bought Instagram because it threatened Facebook's dominance, and hindsight shows that exactly that happened. There's a huge swath of people that dropped off FB and now use Insta, but Meta owns both. It was a great move but it was absolutely anti-competitive at the time.

ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
Now the real thing that has to be seen is whether Mark Zuckerberg is "masculine" enough to escape from "the matrix".
ceejayoz 2y ago
They're also directly behind some of the anti-TikTok push; again, trying to kneecap their competition. https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/report-facebook-hired-pr-firm-to-smear-tiktok/ https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/report-facebook-hi...
- wikipedia 2y ago
  Over the last ~3 years I've been passively following the negative PR campaign against TT by Meta; a lot of the outrage felt a bit manufactured, specifically the outlandish claims like the 'slap a teacher challenge' which, upon investigation, didn't actually exist [0] [0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/slap-a-teacher-tiktok-challenge-hoax/ https://www.vice.com/en/article/slap-a-teacher-tiktok-challe... https://archive.ph/ERLFo https://archive.ph/ERLFo - Facebook paid Targeted Victory, a PR firm, to malign TikTok https://archive.ph/wYuvL https://archive.ph/wYuvL - A whistleblower’s power: Key takeaways from the Facebook Papers https://archive.ph/rWDA4 https://archive.ph/rWDA4 - Mark Zuckerberg says TikTok is a threat to democracy, but didn't say he spent 6 months trying to buy its predecessor https://archive.ph/H8SIk https://archive.ph/H8SIk - Before Mark Zuckerberg Tried To Kill TikTok, He Wanted To Own It https://archive.ph/liFKi https://archive.ph/liFKi - FACEBOOK’S PLAYBOOK TO BEAT COMPETITORS HAS HAD TO CHANGE WITH TIKTOK https://archive.ph/9XSqi https://archive.ph/9XSqi - Facebook Tries to Take Down TikTok https://archive.ph/LWTHf https://archive.ph/LWTHf - Reuters: Factbox: Facebook and TikTok's fraught history - quick look https://archive.ph/H3dfJ https://archive.ph/H3dfJ - Facebook Parent Company Defends Its PR Campaign to Portray TikTok as Threat to American Children

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paxys 2y ago

I don't understand the FTC's strategy here. Their entire case hinges on the fact that the judge will accept that Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat and MeWe (?) are direct competitors of Facebook in the "personal social networking" space while TikTok, YouTube, X, iMessage and all the rest aren't. Unsurprisingly that is what Meta's legal team is spending all of its efforts debating. I really can't see the judge allowing such a cherry-picked definition of what Facebook's market is.

scialex 2y ago
I mean it's not much more unreasonable then the argument that iphones and android phones don't compete but courts bought that.
- granzymes 2y ago
  A court didn’t buy that: the district court and 9th Circuit both held that iOS and Android compete in the Epic v. Apple case. A jury however found that the relevant market in the Epic v. Google case was just Android. Google is understandably appealing that to the 9th Circuit.
whatshisface 2y ago
The definition of a trust isn't a business with no competitors. In fact, a business with no competitors is legal. Antitrust law limits "anti-competitive actions," which are possible even for commodity producers in an efficient market.
- the_clarence 2y ago
  Exactly! So what is anti competitive here?
  - karaterobot 2y ago
    The government has alleged that Meta's acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram was done to reduce competition. Nothing has been established as anti-competitive or not yet, that's why it's in court. Evidence from both sides will be presented. I'm not sure how else to answer that question.

iambateman 2y ago

> Meta could have chosen to compete with then-upstart photo sharing app Instagram in 2012, a senior FTC official said on a call with reporters ahead of the trial, but instead it bought it, and did the same with WhatsApp. This has a potentially very-chilling effect on acquisitions, which are a major source of liquidity for lots of secondary companies.

zombiwoof 2y ago
Maybe these companies should be built to last not be acquired into monolithic borgs
- lenerdenator 2y ago
  But then they'd have to compete and not just shovel more money into the pockets of major individual shareholders, along with the retirement and pension funds of a generation that needs to drastically scale back its post-career ambitions.
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teeklp 2y ago
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huitzitziltzin 2y ago
The large tech firms get a surprisingly large amount of hate on antitrust issues on this website for startups so I appreciate your point bc I think it’s often missed.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  It's almost as if people want to create companies that satisfy somebody's need, instead of pretending to be large so it gets brought...
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skizm 2y ago

What's the point of getting FTC approval of an acquisition in the first place if they can just go back a decade later and undo it?

lenerdenator 2y ago
That's just the concept of judicial review.
colonwqbang 2y ago
They can’t just undo it but they can challenge it in court. But you are right, in a way the FTC is appealing their own decision [1]. US politics can be quite mad at times. [1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2012/08/ftc-closes-its-investigation-facebooks-proposed-acquisition-instagram-photo-sharing-program https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2012/08/...
- jrapdx3 2y ago
  > "US politics can be quite mad at times." No question about the truth of that statement. However, though the FTC approved the acquisition 10 years ago, the current FTC commissioners have evidently concluded that in the interim things have changed. Whether the court agrees with the FTC's logic remains to be seen.
inquirerGeneral 2y ago
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kmeisthax 2y ago
Conversely: if Facebook lies their ass off to the FTC to get their mergers approved, why should we accept those lies as immutable truth?
- skizm 2y ago
  Is that what the FTC is claiming happened?

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vaxman 2y ago

https://youtu.be/cvVBY4QuA5w https://youtu.be/cvVBY4QuA5w I hope Mark issues a public statement that he is dropping his emergency arbitration against her and will allow her book to Publish. I get why he did it, but it didn't work and now it is hurting more than helping. There is no such thing as Bad PR --but an open wound is a different story. (I am on his side in that I don't neurotically hold people accountable for being dbags back in their 20s and early 30s when they aren't that person anymore...google for "brain development at 30" to see why.) PS: Was at a startup that was wiped out by Instagram 4.3. This was after Mr. SnapEgo reportedly turned down a cool $1B and McAfee's lost son snapped up the technically troubled Vine (that Mr. FootInHisMouth should probably retool and rebrand as "X Prime").

alex1138 2y ago
Mr. SnapEgo referring to Zuckerberg?
- vaxman 2y ago
  no
matthewdgreen 2y ago
Lots of people behave stupidly in their early 20s, and then grow out of it later in life. But the key is: they have to grow out of it. I'm not convinced this is true of Zuck.
- goldchainposse 2y ago
  Between his fashion accessories and Joe Rogan appearance, I'm convinced he hasn't. Five years ago, Cheryl Sandberg would call him on it. Today, he's surrounded by yes men.
- vaxman 2y ago
  It's biological https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-47622059 https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-47622059 (mankind didn't know this until the relatively recent advent of "live" brain imaging). Something similar happened with SJobs and today people deify him. Seriously though, Billy was a FB investor (in addition to apparently being a Sith Lord who may have seen an Anakin-echo in youngling Zuck) and it's assumed he didExert influence during the dark period. It must have been intense for Zuck. Can only hope such influence faded with the Epstein scandal, but it's too late for Mark to stay in control of Meta now anyway, unfortunately you have to take the Bad with the Good. Mark's problem now is he's too young to retire and he really, it's not like he can spin-off with Reality Labs and keep going on the Orion stuff --without leadership, that market isLost to Apple now (though Apple's entire C-suite is aging out and since Elon is not available anymore..heh yeah: Zuck, the next CEO of AAPL --halfway callin' it.)

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jmyeet 2y ago

So there are two things you should always bear in mind about any action taken by the current administration: 1. Everything is for sale. Any laws, tariffs, regulations, etc that negatively affect your interests can be bought off. Pardons can be sold. Thanks for the Supreme Court, there is absolutely nothing illegal about the President doing this anymore; and 2. The courts are used to bend individuals and companies to the policy and personal interests of the president. Take Eric Adams's corruption case. The DoJ wanted to dismiss the case without prejudice so it could be re-filed. This threat of future prosecution was the point to keep Adams in line. The courts saw through this thinly-veiled influence peddling and dismissed the case with prejudice. So Meta is being forced to kiss the ring. That means silencing content critical of the administration and allowing right-wing conspiracies and hate speech to spread unfettered. I expect nothing to come of this because these cases all take a decade or more to filter through various appeals, remands back to the trial court, further appeals and so on. But it will absolutely influence how Meta's recommendation algorithms work.

arrosenberg 2y ago
I don't explicitly disagree with anything you wrote, but this action was brought by the Biden administration (technically they re-filed because the judge had thrown the original case out, which was filed during Trump's lame duck period). Half of Trump's support comes from populists, so the FTC has chosen to continue the prosecution.

droningparrot 2y ago

I just want to be able to message people on Instagram without getting sucked into reels

snovymgodym 2y ago

I do not understand what leg the FTC has to stand on in this case at all. I know the company is quite unpopular, but from an objective legal standpoint I don't see how you can make an antitrust/anticompetitive argument here.

charonn0 2y ago
They don't need to be a literal monopoly to be guilty of anti-competitive practices.
- granzymes 2y ago
  FTC does in fact need to show (directly or through indirect evidence) that Meta has monopoly power in a relevant market and that it abused that power in order to win a Section 2 case. If the relevant market ends up including TikTok or YouTube, FTC will be unable to make that showing.

busymom0 2y ago

Not a fan of Meta and I don't have IG, Facebook, WhatsApp etc. However, even in 2012 or so when these acquisitions happened, Snapchat was a much bigger thing. And for me, Reddit was a much bigger thing than FB. I think amongst the antitrust trials, this one is the weakest.

BrtByte 2y ago
Fair take, but I think the key distinction is why Instagram and WhatsApp were targeted specifically

zeroonetwothree 2y ago

I feel the spirit of antitrust being for the benefit of consumers has been lost with the recent round of actions. Virtually every action a corporation takes is “anticompetitive” because surely it wants to defeat the competition. That’s the whole point of capitalism. We shouldn’t be concerned until this is actually anti consumer. And it’s hard to prove consumer harm for free products that aren’t really necessary and have many alternatives.

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NHQ 2y ago

This trial is but a showcase for the berg zucker. Legal proceedings focused on "social networks" and "browser market shares" and app stores. These are ridiculous, superficial, and meaningless. If there was really such a thing as a monopoly on social networking, you would have to kick people off the networks, not just stop the companies operating them. What would change if instagram had to become its own company again? The same people would own it. And that is why antitrust is a joke, it does not prevent the true monopoly of who controls what.

the_clarence 2y ago

What's the argument exactly? What prevents competition from starting a new social network or a new messaging app? Indeed there is a huge number of successful messaging apps (imessage, signal, telegram, wire, wechat, kakao) and social networks (tiktok, snapchat, linkedin, reddit) I know we're supposed to hate on facebook but what exactly is anti competitive?

gizmodo59 2y ago

I may be cynical but Zuck saw this happening and entirely shifted to appease current administration. Even having UFC CEO on board. No way they will breakup META.

techpineapple 2y ago
I dunno, maybe? But you don't even have to be cynical to observe that Mark has a lot of power, and he's an opportunist. I don't think the Repubs trust him, and do you really think that Mark has changed his stripes and doesn't try to cozy up to the next administration if he thinks there's another vibe shift? Also, it feels like that would be quite a scalp for Trump to brag about.

mrandish 2y ago

So Mark Z's recent $20M "donation" to Trump's presidential library apparently wasn't enough. This would all be much easier for everyone if there was an official rate card and price list.

beefnugs 2y ago
His payment will work just fine, this is to weed out all the judges that wont follow orders for purging

stackskipton 2y ago

Shout out to https://www.bigtechontrial.com/ https://www.bigtechontrial.com/ which covered Google Trial and is now covering Facebook trial. Disclaimer: Matt Stoller is big on anti monopoly so he's in support of government in both cases but overall, his coverage is really good and more details than you will probably get from other outlets.

chalst 1y ago
Why the disclaimer? We know that monopolies make bad platform owners.

MPSFounder 2y ago

A recent HN article shows Facebook silenced Pro Palestine posts due to Israeli interference. The issue with Meta controlling so many social media outlets is control over information. A populace that is uninformed will welcome a master (and deserves one), and will look the other way when genocides and injustice take place in our world. The audience of HN is educated and unlikely to fall for misinformation. However, I have seen firsthand how anti-immigrant sentiments, racism and anti-muslim sentiment [1] can prosper when one man controls the flow of information, for they can steer public opinion in ways that are alien to our morals (and favors either their personal politics, their bottom dollar or other nefarious reasons). This is somewhat similar to the Sinclair family running identical stories on many TV stations they control to control narratives. However, Meta has much greater reach. Their role in allowing Russian interference in US elections for ad revenue has largely been forgotten, but Zuck played a role in spreading misinformation and allowing fake users (pretending to be Americans) to steer anger in the population, and allowed a foreign entity to spend their dollars favoring an American candidate (Election meddling). Ultimately, you can argue we must check our sources, but once again, HN is a small bubble. I know firsthand from Meta engineers that Facebook does practically nothing to stop Russian and Iranian threats and is in bed with the Israelis. I hope the FTC comes for their a-- [1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-facebooks-systems-promoted-violence-against-rohingya-meta-owes-reparations-new-report/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...

worik 1y ago
> A populace that is uninformed will welcome a master (and deserves one) That parenthetical addition is a bit harsh!

zombiwoof 2y ago

Everyone is missing the point: facts don’t matter What matters is: if Donald Trump wants to break up Meta just for fun, nothing can stop him and he will do it. Just for fun

1vuio0pswjnm7 2y ago

https://archive.md/20250414152053/https://www.axios.com/pro/tech-policy/2025/04/14/ftc-meta-antitrust-trial-kicks-off-in-federal-court https://archive.md/20250414152053/https://www.axios.com/pro/...

jfvinueza 2y ago

What has actually changed in the last 13 years regarding Whatsapp? Video. And I believe that's the reason why anyone hasn't actually challenged them regarding messaging: you can build a similar application with similar features with a rather small group of people (not saying it's easy, but it's feasible). But handling those pentabytes of bandwith shared every day? Actually _promoting_ the use of DIY video as the preferred communication media? That's something you can't do as an small shop. And that's, I think, why you cannot compete. I decided to quit Whatsapp, which in Latinamerica is quite an outrageous move: that application is the communication channel for EVERYTHING: all families, all schools, all neighborhoods. I did it because I think Meta's main metric is actually hostile to their users: they want as much of your time as they can get from you, and they'll use are sorts of psychological weaponry to keep you inside. They were actually vocal about it in the past. There's zero reason to trust them. But why is it that no one has come up with a true alternative (although props to Signal)? Well, there's the network effect, for sure. They also employ very good engineers. But I believe the true reason is scale: it didn't use to be that way, but infrastructure costs are now inmense.

xlinux 2y ago

I wish death to meta.its destroyed whole generation.

karhuton 2y ago

As someone who’s stuck with Whatsapp and no way out (friends and family won’t switch), I dearly hope for a split. I do struggle to understand how we here casually lump tohether totally different platforms as comptetitors. It’s not like I can use Youtube or Tiktok instead of Whatsapp with my family for direct and group discussion. Even X and Instagram would be a stretch, as their raison d’être is public social media and not instant messaging. Sure the platforms have overlapping features, but you ain’t gonna use a knife insted of a spoon.

Spivak 2y ago
YouTube, X, and Tiktok compete with Meta's products in different verticals so it's not really a fair comparison. But at the same time WhatsApp is drowning in competition from a thousand different messengers so I'm not sure if this point really matters. Like X isn't competing with FB Marketplace but Craigslist sure is. TikTok isn't competing with FB Events but Apple Events and Eventbrite are.
- skydhash 2y ago
  As long as WhatsApp have a strong backer like Meta, then using the term competition is meaningless. In many countries, WA is the de facto IM platform, but I can bet that it hasn't received a dim from those users. So how do they pay their developers, infrastructure, and surrounding resources?
spacebanana7 2y ago
Use email. Everyone has an email address and it's socially awkward for them if they don't respond. Also has all the benefits of being an open protocol rather than a corporate garden.
- rreichman 2y ago
  using an email for chat like people use whatsapp is not practical
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valeg 2y ago

This seems like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukos https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukos lite So much for Zuck's white flags and ring-kissing.

WhyNotHugo 2y ago
Funny how Wikipedia articles for Russian oligarchs refer to them as "oligarch", but articles for US oligarchs refers to them as "businessman".

rib3ye 2y ago

Is it really lost on people that the POTUS owns a competing social network platform?

emsign 2y ago

Another scheme of the administration to blackmail a big company into submission. I'm not against sued a big company because of antitrust/monopoly but my fear is that Meta gets off the hook once Zuck jumps through Trump's hoops and sells out the customers to the new dictator.

BrtByte 2y ago

Regardless of where you land on Meta's ethics, this case feels like a high-stakes stress test for retroactive antitrust enforcement. If the FTC succeeds here, it basically rewrites the "finality" of M&A decisions in tech... and that'll ripple way beyond Meta.

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TimPC 2y ago

I think the illegal monopoly claims are a bit out there given the range of offerings in the social network space. Are they arguing that Instagram specifically is a monopoly in photo-oriented social networking because X is mostly text and YouTube and TikTok is mostly video? I don't see any particular time you can point to where Facebook+Instagram+WhatsApp was a monoopoly in any sort of broad social networking space, especially not the WhatsApp part which competes with iMessage which is an absolute behemoth in terms of market share.

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