Meta antitrust trial kicks off in federal court

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?

That's just the concept of judicial review.

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/...

Conversely: if Facebook lies their ass off to the FTC to get their mergers approved, why should we accept those lies as immutable truth?

Is that what the FTC is claiming happened?

> What's the point of getting FTC approval

Efficiency? The people at the FTC reviewing mergers can't be experts of every corner of the economy, but if they catch an illegal merger during the approval process it can be blocked early without having to go to court.

An illegal merger is illegal no matter what. It's the corporation's responsibility to not break the law.

I'm positive that OP understands the reason for an FTC approval. Why did you cut the quote off in the middle of the sentence? The point is about why it's acceptable for the FTC to approve something, and then years later come back and change the decision.

I was too lazy to add an ellipsis. I was replying to the whole comment.

> The point is about why it's acceptable for the FTC to approve something, and then years later come back and change the decision.

I addressed that in my comment (it was the entire point of my comment, actually)

> "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.

It seems inefficient to retcon mergers as illegal a decade later. A merger is not necessarily black and white illegal or legal; just something vague on a grey spectrum that the FTC happens to be choosing to color an argument for one way or the other depending on current administrative priorities.

I hope so. When WhatsApp was acquired, they claimed that it would not be possible to cross-reference users between Facebook and WhatsApp. On both platforms users were required to provide a phone number. Cross-referencing users was trivial, and it's still amazing that this lie was accepted as truth at the time.