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Meta antitrust trial kicks off in federal court

(www.axios.com)
431 points c420 | 4 comments | 14 Apr 25 13:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.804s | source
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henryfjordan ◴[14 Apr 25 19:16 UTC] No.43685057[source]▶
> "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.

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paxys ◴[14 Apr 25 20:09 UTC] No.43685767[source]▶
If everyone indeed "knew at the time" then why did the FTC allow the acquisition to go through in a 5-0 vote?
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surge ◴[14 Apr 25 20:14 UTC] No.43685818[source]▶
This is what I don't get, the FTC is suing because the FTC allowed something to happen, when the platforms had even more dominance than they do now?

Kind of stinks of less than valid motivations based on the timing of bringing this up over a decade after the fact.

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borski ◴[14 Apr 25 21:40 UTC] No.43686621[source]▶
Something being predicted poorly, hypothetically, doesn’t mean you can’t rectify a past mistake, right?

Not specifically related to this case, necessarily, but if you let an acquisition go through and discover a decade later that it was, in fact, anticompetitive (and intentionally so), presumably you would still try to break up the resulting monopoly, even if you didn’t predict it would happen?

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YetAnotherNick ◴[14 Apr 25 22:06 UTC] No.43686816[source]▶
Mistake shouldn't be based on outcome. If Instagram failed, would they still have the antitrust case?
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1. blackguardx ◴[14 Apr 25 22:15 UTC] No.43686877[source]▶
Take a look at the Alcoa case from 1945 [0]. The courts ruled that Alcoa was an illegal monopoly even though it acquired that status legally.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Alcoa

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2. henlobenlo ◴[15 Apr 25 00:55 UTC] No.43687943[source]▶
This court decision seems insane, being illegal because you work hard to become the best.
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3. forgetfreeman ◴[15 Apr 25 02:12 UTC] No.43688370[source]▶
Being a monopoly is correctly illegal regardless of how that status was obtained.
4. yieldcrv ◴[15 Apr 25 08:25 UTC] No.43690306[source]▶
Wow that would never happen now! Interesting how

A) that would be considered bad law now.

B) despite all branches of government going after Alcoa (Congress passing a special law to support the case mid way through), nothing happened upon remanding the case to the lower court due to the successful argument that other companies began competing

C) that would never happen now primarily due to only anticompetitive practices being scrutinized, not merely having the ability to control prices. But now I see where the confusion comes from, a 13 year saga in support of the Sherman Act

D) it’s so interesting how much the country changed solely from trying to differentiate itself from communism. So its gone to more of an extreme of private maximum extractable value.