Latest News “Stay informed with breaking news, world news, US news, politics, business, technology, and more at latest news.

Category: meta monopoly trial

Auto Added by WPeMatico

  • Threat of Meta breakup looms as FTC’s monopoly trial ends

    After weeks of arguments in the Federal Trade Commission’s monopoly trial, Meta is done defending its decade-plus-old acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp—at least for now.

    The seven-week trial ended Tuesday, with the FTC urging Judge James Boasberg to rule that a breakup is necessary to end Meta’s alleged monopoly in the “personal social networking services” market, where Meta currently faces sparse competition among other apps connecting friends and family. As alleged by the FTC, Meta’s internal emails laid bare that Meta’s motive in acquiring both Instagram and WhatsApp was to pay whatever it took to snuff out dominant rivals threatening to lure users away from Facebook—Mark Zuckerberg’s jewel.

    Talking to Bloomberg, Meta has maintained that the FTC’s case is weak, seeking to undo deals that the FTC approved long ago while ignoring the competition Meta faces from rivals in the broader social media market, like TikTok. But Meta’s attempt to shut down the case mid-trial was rebuffed by Boasberg, who has signaled he will take months to weigh his decision.

    Read full article

    Comments

  • Meta hypes AI friends as social media’s future, but users want real connections

    If you ask the man who has largely shaped how friends and family connect on social media over the past two decades about the future of social media, you may not get a straight answer.

    At the Federal Trade Commission’s monopoly trial, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attempted what seemed like an artful dodge to avoid criticism that his company allegedly bought out rivals Instagram and WhatsApp to lock users into Meta’s family of apps so they would never post about their personal lives anywhere else. He testified that people actually engage with social media less often these days to connect with loved ones, preferring instead to discover entertaining content on platforms to share in private messages with friends and family.

    As Zuckerberg spins it, Meta no longer perceives much advantage in dominating the so-called personal social networking market where Facebook made its name and cemented what the FTC alleged is an illegal monopoly.

    Read full article

    Comments

  • Meta argues enshittification isn’t real in bid to toss FTC monopoly trial

    Meta thinks there’s no reason to carry on with its defense after the Federal Trade Commission closed its monopoly case, and the company has moved to end the trial early by claiming that the FTC utterly failed to prove its case.

    “The FTC has no proof that Meta has monopoly power,” Meta’s motion for judgment filed Thursday said, “and therefore the court should rule in favor of Meta.”

    According to Meta, the FTC failed to show evidence that “the overall quality of Meta’s apps has declined” or that the company shows too many ads to users. Meta says that’s “fatal” to the FTC’s case that the company wielded monopoly power to pursue more ad revenue while degrading user experience over time (an Internet trend known as “enshittification”). And on top of allegedly showing no evidence of “ad load, privacy, integrity, and features” degradation on Meta apps, Meta argued there’s no precedent for an antitrust claim rooted in this alleged harm.

    Read full article

    Comments

  • Zuckerberg stifled Instagram because he loves Facebook, Instagram founder says

    At the Meta monopoly trial, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom accused Mark Zuckerberg of draining Instagram resources to stifle growth out of sheer jealousy.

    According to Systrom, Zuckerberg may have been directly involved in yanking resources after integrating Instagram and Facebook because “as the founder of Facebook, he felt a lot of emotion around which one was better—Instagram or Facebook,” The Financial Times reported.

    In 2025, Instagram is projected to account for more than half of Meta’s ad revenue, according to eMarketer’s forecast. Since 2019, Instagram has generated more ad revenue per user than Facebook, eMarketer noted, and today makes Meta twice as much per user as the closest rival that Meta claims it fears most, TikTok.

    Read full article

    Comments

  • At monopoly trial, Zuckerberg redefined social media as texting with friends

    The Meta monopoly trial has raised a question that Meta hopes the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) can’t effectively answer: How important is it to use social media to connect with friends and family today?

    Connecting with friends was, of course, Facebook’s primary use case as it became the rare social network to hit 1 billion users—not by being acquired by a Big Tech company but based on the strength of its clean interface and the network effects that kept users locked in simply because all the important people in their life chose to be there.

    According to the FTC, Meta took advantage of Facebook’s early popularity, and it has since bought out rivals and otherwise cornered the market on personal social networks. Only Snapchat and MeWe (a privacy-focused Facebook alternative) are competitors to Meta platforms, the FTC argues, and social networks like TikTok or YouTube aren’t interchangeable, because those aren’t destinations focused on connecting friends and family.

    Read full article

    Comments

  • Zuckerberg’s 2012 email dubbed “smoking gun” at Meta monopoly trial

    Starting the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) antitrust trial Monday with a bang, Daniel Matheson, the FTC’s lead litigator, flagged a “smoking gun”—a 2012 email where Mark Zuckerberg suggested that Facebook could buy Instagram to “neutralize a potential competitor,” The New York Times reported.

    And in “another banger of an email from Zuckerberg,” Brendan Benedict, an antitrust expert monitoring the trial for Big Tech on Trial, posted on X that the Meta CEO wrote, “Messenger isn’t beating WhatsApp. Instagram was growing so much faster than us that we had to buy them for $1 billion… that’s not exactly killing it.”

    These messages and others, the FTC hopes to convince the court, provide evidence that Zuckerberg runs Meta by the mantra “it’s better to buy than compete”—seemingly for more than a decade intent on growing the Facebook empire by killing off rivals, allegedly in violation of antitrust law. Another message from Zuckerberg exhibited at trial, Benedict noted on X, suggests Facebook tried to buy yet another rival, Snapchat, for $6 billion.

    Read full article

    Comments