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The government should be scrutinizing Meta’s power. Unfortunately, its legal attack isn’t cutting to the heart of what keeps Meta big.
This week, I spent three days in a Washington, DC courtroom watching Mark Zuckerberg testify. He was there defending his company from being broken up by the Federal Trade Commission, which is seeking to unwind his acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp on the grounds that they were anticompetitive. At times, he was made uncomfortable and challenged with evidence that he wanted to “neutralize” rivals. Primarily, what I observed was the FTC’s misunderstanding of how social media works.
To establish the market it argues Meta has a monopoly in, the FTC has defined a subset of social media that it calls “personal social networking services.” This category includes apps that primarily facilitate sharing between friends and family, but for some reason, doesn’t include private messaging apps. The government argues that Meta’s only competitors in this market are Snapchat and MeWe, an obscure, blockchain-based social network that claims to have 20 million users. Conveniently for the FTC, including only these two companies gives Meta a de fac …
Read the full story at The Verge.
