The government doesn’t understand Meta

The government should examine the power of the meta. Unfortunately, his legal attack is not cutting into the heart of things that keep the meta.

This week, I spent three days watching in Washington, DC Court Room Mark Zuckerberg Witness. He was defending his company by the Federal Trade Commission, trying to open the acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp on the basis that they are contradictory. Sometimes, he was anxious and challenged with evidence that he wanted to “neutralize” rivals. Basically, what I witnessed was the misunderstanding of the FTC as to how social media works.

It is argued that the market has a monopoly in the meta, the FTC describes a subset of social media that they call “personal social networking services”. This category includes apps that mainly facilitate sharing between friends and family, but for some reason, private messaging apps do not include. The government believes that Meta’s only rival in this market is Snap Chat and Mvi, which is an unclear, blockchain -based social network that claims it is 20 million users. Easily for the FTC, including these two companies provide MetaAta with 80 % market share, legal monopoly in the United States.

The FTC must know that this market definition is ridiculous because the agency’s central lawyer for this case, Daniel MatthewDid not ask Zuckerberg about the Maywee Once He was on the stand stand for about 13 hours. When he finally asked about the Maywee by the Meta’s lead attorney, Mark HansonZuckerberg testified that he had not heard about it before the government trial.

I sympathize with such a dissatisfaction case, and the difficulty of explaining the market for the judge James Boseburg Eventually the FTC’s definition (or the wider one of the meta) can neglect for itself. This week, after the Google advertisement monopoly case was lost, it is noteworthy that the judges have recently ruled the government twice in favor of the government in the Big Tech Anti -Trust. On TV, FTC chair Andrew Ferguson In the meantime, he is talking to someone’s audience, trying to frame the Meta case as a war against censorship. This could give the FTC a political lead in winning the courtroom.

The FTC is trying to rotate any kind of legal rotation here, it is not coming into the original source of meta power, or even the original market. If the government properly included all the players who have considered rivals – tickets, YouTube, Ismail, X, Telegram, etc. – There is no way in which there is no debate that it has a monopoly. Consumer behavior strongly shows that this is a wider market reality. Meta presented admission data at the trial, showing how Facebook and Instagram traffic had increased when the Taxotk was briefly offline earlier this year.

Since there has been a focus on the pursuit of more than a decade since then, there have been fundamental changes since then, the FTC has been widely ignoring what is developing in the meta business: the impact of the network. The more people are on the social network, the more difficult it becomes. It is mentioned in the legal superstition through force, but it is far from the attention of the matter.

From time to time, Zuckerberg has taken advantage of the network effects to expand its empire. He did this with Facebook to grow Instagram. As a result, the infrastructure created for these apps has been used for the WhatsApp scale, which now has about 3 billion users. He is using Instagram to grow threads and merging the lama -powered features into all its apps.

Zuckerberg told the witness’s position, “If an app becomes large enough, it has the opportunity to spread and do different things,” Zuckerberg said to the witness’s position. For example, this can be a problem of self -reliance on its own.

Certainly, Spinning Instagram and WhatsApp can produce new short -term competitors in different companies. But to maintain this competition for a long time, you want to give people your profiles, and possibly their friend lists to other services with you. There are confidentiality and regulatory nightmares to implement such a thing, but it cannot be denied that people want to overcome this level. ()

The FTC vs meta -trial is still underway and can still prove that the company needs to be broken. However, so far, the government appears to be deprived of this point.

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