The government doesn’t understand Meta
The government should be scrutinizing Metaas 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 aneutralizea 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 apersonal social networking services.a This category includes apps that primarily facilitate sharing between friends and family, but for some reason, doesnat include private messaging apps. The government argues that Metaas 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 …