The government does not understand Meta

The government is expected to examine Meta’s power. Unfortunately, his legal attack does not cut at the heart of what keeps the meta large.

This week, I spent three days in a Washington, DC courtroom Mark Zuckerberg testify. He was there to defend his business to be broken by the Federal Trade Commission, which is Seeking to relax its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp on the grounds that they were anti -competitive. Sometimes he was uncomfortable and challenged by evidence that he wanted to “neutralize” the rivals. Mainly, what I observed was the misunderstanding by the FTC on the functioning of social media.

To establish the market, he argues that Meta has a monopoly, the FTC has defined a subset of social media which he calls “personal social networking”. This category includes applications that mainly facilitate sharing between friends and family, but for any reason, does not include private messaging applications. The government argues that Meta’s only competitors on this market are Snapchat and Mewe, an obscure and blockchain -based social network that claims to have 20 million users. Practically for the FTC, in particular these two companies give META a status of de facto legal monopoly in the United States with a market share of 80%.

The FTC should know that this definition of the market is ridiculous because the main lawyer for the case, Daniel Mathesondid not ask Zuckerberg on Mewe once For about 13 hours, he was on the stand of witnesses. When he was finally questioned on Mewe by Meta’s main lawyer, Mark HansenZuckerberg testified that he had not heard of it before the government’s trial.

I sympathize with the difficulty of defining the market for an antitrust case like this, and of judging James Boasberg Can ultimately ignore the definition of the FTC (or the much wider meta) for its own anyway. After the loss by Google of its case of monopoly on advertising technology this week, it should be noted that the judges recently ruled twice in favor of the government in the antitrust prosecutions of Big Tech. On television, FTC chair Andrew Ferguson is pending an audience of one trying to frame the meta as a fight against censorship. This can give the FTC a political advantage to mark a victory beyond the courtroom.

Whatever the type of legal leaving that the FTC tries to do here, it does not obtain the real source of Meta’s power, or even the real market in which it operates. If the government included with precision all the actors that Meta considers competitors – Tiktok, YouTube, Imessage, X, Telegram, etc. Consumer behavior strongly suggests that this wider market is a reality; Meta presented internal data at the trial that showed how Facebook and Instagram traffic jumped when Tiktok was briefly offline in the United States earlier this year.

As it focuses on the acquisitions of more than a decade ago on a market that has undergone radical changes since then, the FTC largely ignores what Meta’s activities are developing: the effects of the network. The more people on a social network, the more difficult it becomes to dislodge. The trial mentions it as a source of power, but it is far from being at the center of the case.

Zuckerberg has repeatedly exploited the effects of the network to develop his empire. He did it with Facebook to develop Instagram. In turn, the infrastructure developed for these applications has been used to scale WhatsApp, which now has nearly 3 billion users. It does it again using Instagram to develop wires and integrate features powered by Lama in all its applications.

“If an application becomes large enough, it has the possibility of spreading and doing different things,” said Zuckerberg from the stand of the witness. This can be a full -fledged antitrust problem – Google, for example, has been accused of using its leverage effect on a single market to unjustly promote products on a different market, but it is a sustainable source of power that the simple fact of breaking the business will not solve.

Of course, running Instagram and WhatsApp in different companies could create new short -term competitors. But to maintain this competition in the long term, you would like to let people take their profiles, and maybe even their lists of friends, with them to other services. This kind of thing is a nightmare of intimacy and regulation to be implemented, but it is undeniable that people want this level of control – just look at the buzz around Bluesky and pub activity, the latter of which Meta hung wires. ()

FTC c. Meta Trial is just beginning and can always provide overwhelming evidence that the company must be broken. However, so far, the government seems to miss the point.

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