• Europe threatens Apple with additional fines

    The European Commission has published its full Digital Markets Actdecision against Apple, and it’s far, far worse than anybody expected. The Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, has accepted absolutely none of Apple’s arguments against being fined, and the decision threatens yet more existential damage to the company.

    Apple isn’t winning the argument, and, right or wrong, the decision has fangs.

    Huge fines, big threats

    Europe announced in April that it would fine Apple an eye-popping €500 million for noncompliance with the DMA, giving Apple 60 days to comply with its decision. One month later, the Commission published the full ruling against Apple, which details that changes the company made to its App Store rules did not go far enough to bring it into compliance.

    The decision warns that Apple is subject to additional periodic fines in the future if it fails to comply with the Commission’s strict interpretation of the DMA, no matter how inherently punitive some of its demands may be. We’ll know soon enough if there are to be wider consequences to Europe’s demands. Apple now has 30 days to fully comply with the DMAor face additional fines.

    The act itself came into force in November 2022 and began to be implemented against companies defined as ‘gatekeepers’ in 2023. The intention is to stop Apple and others from using their market position to impose anticompetitive limitations on developers. 

    Who is steering?

    The big bugbear relates to Apple’s anti-steering restrictions, which prevent developers from telling customers they can purchase services outside the App Store. The DMA demands that Apple let developers offer this option, which Apple does, but Europe argues that the limitations the company makes on doing so are not in compliance with the law.

    Europe also says Apple’s existing restrictions, fees, and technical limitations undermine the effectiveness of the DMA. That seems to mean Apple cannot charge a commission and cannot warn users of the consequences they face when shopping outside the App Store. 

    The Commission even plays dumb to the potential significance of permitting developers to link out to any website from within their apps, rather than being constrained to approvedsites. It says Apple has provided insufficient justification for this restriction and also wants Apple to remove messages warning users when they are about to make a transaction outside the App Store. 

    That’s going to be particularly pleasing to fraudsters, who may now attempt to create fake payment portals that look like reputable ones. Apple prevented billion in fraud last year, the company has confirmed. Perhaps once the first big frauds take place, the EU may catch up to the online risks we all know exist.

    While I understand the original aim of Europe’s Digital Markets Act, the demands the Commission is making of Apple appear to go far beyond the original objective, which was to open up Apple’s platforms to competition. 

    The decisions now open Apple’s platform up to competitors. 

    There is a difference between the two, and, as described, it means Apple must now create and manage its platforms while permitting competitors to profit from those platforms at little or no cost.

    Apple rejects Europe

    Apple will fight in Europe. 

    “There is nothing in the 70-page decision released today that justifies the European Commission’s targeted actions against Apple, which threaten the privacy and security of our users in Europe and force us to give away our technology for free,” the company said. “Their decision and unprecedented fine came after the Commission continuously moved the goalposts on compliance, and repeatedly blocked Apple’s months-long efforts to implement a new solution. The decision is bad for innovation, bad for competition, bad for our products, and bad for users. While we appeal, we’ll continue engaging with the Commission to advocate on behalf of our European customers.”

    When the fine was initially revealed, the company also said: 

    “Today’s announcements are yet another example of the European Commission unfairly targeting Apple in a series of decisions that are bad for the privacy and security of our users, bad for products, and force us to give away our technology for free. We have spent hundreds of thousands of engineering hours and made dozens of changes to comply with this law, none of which our users have asked for. Despite countless meetings, the Commission continues to move the goal posts every step of the way.”

    My take? 

    Far from saving Europe’s tech industry, the manner in which the DMA is being applied will make the region even less relevant. Lacking a significant platform of its own, Europe’s approach will reduce choice and increase insecurity.

    As the clear first target of the DMA, Apple will inevitably be forced to increase prices, charge developers more for access to its developer tools, and will I think simply stop selling some products and services in Europe, rather than threaten customer security. We know it can do this because it has done so before.

    Fundamentally, of course, the big question remains unaddressed: How much profit it is legitimate to make on any product or service? I imagine the European Commission doesn’t want to go near a question as fundamental to capitalist wealth extraction as that. Can you imagine the collapse in executive bonuses that would follow a decision to define what the maximum profit made in any business transaction should be?

    Lobbyists across the political spectrum would be appalled — that extra profit pays for their meals. Looking to the extent to which the current application of the DMA seems to favor Apple’s biggest competitors, I can’t help but imagine it’s been paying for a few European meals already. Nice work, if you can get it. 

    You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, Mastodon, and MeWe.
    #europe #threatens #apple #with #additional
    Europe threatens Apple with additional fines
    The European Commission has published its full Digital Markets Actdecision against Apple, and it’s far, far worse than anybody expected. The Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, has accepted absolutely none of Apple’s arguments against being fined, and the decision threatens yet more existential damage to the company. Apple isn’t winning the argument, and, right or wrong, the decision has fangs. Huge fines, big threats Europe announced in April that it would fine Apple an eye-popping €500 million for noncompliance with the DMA, giving Apple 60 days to comply with its decision. One month later, the Commission published the full ruling against Apple, which details that changes the company made to its App Store rules did not go far enough to bring it into compliance. The decision warns that Apple is subject to additional periodic fines in the future if it fails to comply with the Commission’s strict interpretation of the DMA, no matter how inherently punitive some of its demands may be. We’ll know soon enough if there are to be wider consequences to Europe’s demands. Apple now has 30 days to fully comply with the DMAor face additional fines. The act itself came into force in November 2022 and began to be implemented against companies defined as ‘gatekeepers’ in 2023. The intention is to stop Apple and others from using their market position to impose anticompetitive limitations on developers.  Who is steering? The big bugbear relates to Apple’s anti-steering restrictions, which prevent developers from telling customers they can purchase services outside the App Store. The DMA demands that Apple let developers offer this option, which Apple does, but Europe argues that the limitations the company makes on doing so are not in compliance with the law. Europe also says Apple’s existing restrictions, fees, and technical limitations undermine the effectiveness of the DMA. That seems to mean Apple cannot charge a commission and cannot warn users of the consequences they face when shopping outside the App Store.  The Commission even plays dumb to the potential significance of permitting developers to link out to any website from within their apps, rather than being constrained to approvedsites. It says Apple has provided insufficient justification for this restriction and also wants Apple to remove messages warning users when they are about to make a transaction outside the App Store.  That’s going to be particularly pleasing to fraudsters, who may now attempt to create fake payment portals that look like reputable ones. Apple prevented billion in fraud last year, the company has confirmed. Perhaps once the first big frauds take place, the EU may catch up to the online risks we all know exist. While I understand the original aim of Europe’s Digital Markets Act, the demands the Commission is making of Apple appear to go far beyond the original objective, which was to open up Apple’s platforms to competition.  The decisions now open Apple’s platform up to competitors.  There is a difference between the two, and, as described, it means Apple must now create and manage its platforms while permitting competitors to profit from those platforms at little or no cost. Apple rejects Europe Apple will fight in Europe.  “There is nothing in the 70-page decision released today that justifies the European Commission’s targeted actions against Apple, which threaten the privacy and security of our users in Europe and force us to give away our technology for free,” the company said. “Their decision and unprecedented fine came after the Commission continuously moved the goalposts on compliance, and repeatedly blocked Apple’s months-long efforts to implement a new solution. The decision is bad for innovation, bad for competition, bad for our products, and bad for users. While we appeal, we’ll continue engaging with the Commission to advocate on behalf of our European customers.” When the fine was initially revealed, the company also said:  “Today’s announcements are yet another example of the European Commission unfairly targeting Apple in a series of decisions that are bad for the privacy and security of our users, bad for products, and force us to give away our technology for free. We have spent hundreds of thousands of engineering hours and made dozens of changes to comply with this law, none of which our users have asked for. Despite countless meetings, the Commission continues to move the goal posts every step of the way.” My take?  Far from saving Europe’s tech industry, the manner in which the DMA is being applied will make the region even less relevant. Lacking a significant platform of its own, Europe’s approach will reduce choice and increase insecurity. As the clear first target of the DMA, Apple will inevitably be forced to increase prices, charge developers more for access to its developer tools, and will I think simply stop selling some products and services in Europe, rather than threaten customer security. We know it can do this because it has done so before. Fundamentally, of course, the big question remains unaddressed: How much profit it is legitimate to make on any product or service? I imagine the European Commission doesn’t want to go near a question as fundamental to capitalist wealth extraction as that. Can you imagine the collapse in executive bonuses that would follow a decision to define what the maximum profit made in any business transaction should be? Lobbyists across the political spectrum would be appalled — that extra profit pays for their meals. Looking to the extent to which the current application of the DMA seems to favor Apple’s biggest competitors, I can’t help but imagine it’s been paying for a few European meals already. Nice work, if you can get it.  You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, Mastodon, and MeWe. #europe #threatens #apple #with #additional
    WWW.COMPUTERWORLD.COM
    Europe threatens Apple with additional fines
    The European Commission has published its full Digital Markets Act (DMA) decision against Apple, and it’s far, far worse than anybody expected. The Commission, the executive arm of the European Union, has accepted absolutely none of Apple’s arguments against being fined, and the decision threatens yet more existential damage to the company. Apple isn’t winning the argument, and, right or wrong, the decision has fangs. Huge fines, big threats Europe announced in April that it would fine Apple an eye-popping €500 million for noncompliance with the DMA, giving Apple 60 days to comply with its decision. One month later, the Commission published the full ruling against Apple, which details that changes the company made to its App Store rules did not go far enough to bring it into compliance. The decision warns that Apple is subject to additional periodic fines in the future if it fails to comply with the Commission’s strict interpretation of the DMA, no matter how inherently punitive some of its demands may be. (Can anyone else spell “tariffs”?) We’ll know soon enough if there are to be wider consequences to Europe’s demands. Apple now has 30 days to fully comply with the DMA (in Europe’s opinion) or face additional fines. The act itself came into force in November 2022 and began to be implemented against companies defined as ‘gatekeepers’ in 2023. The intention is to stop Apple and others from using their market position to impose anticompetitive limitations on developers.  Who is steering? The big bugbear relates to Apple’s anti-steering restrictions, which prevent developers from telling customers they can purchase services outside the App Store. The DMA demands that Apple let developers offer this option, which Apple does, but Europe argues that the limitations the company makes on doing so are not in compliance with the law. Europe also says Apple’s existing restrictions, fees, and technical limitations undermine the effectiveness of the DMA. That seems to mean Apple cannot charge a commission and cannot warn users of the consequences they face when shopping outside the App Store.  The Commission even plays dumb to the potential significance of permitting developers to link out to any website from within their apps, rather than being constrained to approved (and secure) sites. It says Apple has provided insufficient justification for this restriction and also wants Apple to remove messages warning users when they are about to make a transaction outside the App Store.  That’s going to be particularly pleasing to fraudsters, who may now attempt to create fake payment portals that look like reputable ones. Apple prevented $2 billion in fraud last year, the company has confirmed. Perhaps once the first big frauds take place, the EU may catch up to the online risks we all know exist. While I understand the original aim of Europe’s Digital Markets Act, the demands the Commission is making of Apple appear to go far beyond the original objective, which was to open up Apple’s platforms to competition.  The decisions now open Apple’s platform up to competitors.  There is a difference between the two, and, as described, it means Apple must now create and manage its platforms while permitting competitors to profit from those platforms at little or no cost. Apple rejects Europe Apple will fight in Europe.  “There is nothing in the 70-page decision released today that justifies the European Commission’s targeted actions against Apple, which threaten the privacy and security of our users in Europe and force us to give away our technology for free,” the company said. “Their decision and unprecedented fine came after the Commission continuously moved the goalposts on compliance, and repeatedly blocked Apple’s months-long efforts to implement a new solution. The decision is bad for innovation, bad for competition, bad for our products, and bad for users. While we appeal, we’ll continue engaging with the Commission to advocate on behalf of our European customers.” When the fine was initially revealed, the company also said:  “Today’s announcements are yet another example of the European Commission unfairly targeting Apple in a series of decisions that are bad for the privacy and security of our users, bad for products, and force us to give away our technology for free. We have spent hundreds of thousands of engineering hours and made dozens of changes to comply with this law, none of which our users have asked for. Despite countless meetings, the Commission continues to move the goal posts every step of the way.” My take?  Far from saving Europe’s tech industry, the manner in which the DMA is being applied will make the region even less relevant. Lacking a significant platform of its own, Europe’s approach will reduce choice and increase insecurity. As the clear first target of the DMA, Apple will inevitably be forced to increase prices, charge developers more for access to its developer tools, and will I think simply stop selling some products and services in Europe, rather than threaten customer security. We know it can do this because it has done so before. Fundamentally, of course, the big question remains unaddressed: How much profit it is legitimate to make on any product or service? I imagine the European Commission doesn’t want to go near a question as fundamental to capitalist wealth extraction as that. Can you imagine the collapse in executive bonuses that would follow a decision to define what the maximum profit made in any business transaction should be? Lobbyists across the political spectrum would be appalled — that extra profit pays for their meals. Looking to the extent to which the current application of the DMA seems to favor Apple’s biggest competitors, I can’t help but imagine it’s been paying for a few European meals already. Nice work, if you can get it.  You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, Mastodon, and MeWe.
    0 Yorumlar 0 hisse senetleri
  • Retro Modern Moondrop Ultrasonic earbuds will be the perfect pair for a Mission to Mars

    There are wireless earbuds in tons on the market – virtually leaving you frustrated which one fits your requirements the closest. The recent trend of see-through earbuds has caught up with the early adopters who love the visual intricacy of rejoicing the innards of their loved gadgets. Nothing sparked off this long-buried fad with their maiden earbuds that caught world’s attention.
    The Arctis GameBuds Glorange makes you fall in love while the Moondrop Pill tingles your compulsive instinct to make the purchase right away. Somewehre in between these two options sits the Moondrop’s another pair of earbuds that has gone under the radar but is no slouch by any stretch of imagination. Perfect for space phantasy enthusiasts, the pair has a retro-modern charm with the impressive specifications that will interest audiophiles.
    Designer: Moondrop

    Moondrop Ultrasonic is a pair of earbuds in contention for being one of the most balanced visual pleasers. It is a hybrid between a see-through look and the sci-fi aesthetic dominated pair of buds. The dual-driver hybrid TWS tuned by professional engineers has a combination of DD+BA drivers on each side to deliver high-quality sound. Add to the equation a FRA Lithium-Magnesium alloy balanced armature tweeter and your search for a natural sounding high frequency spectrum is a given. The 13mm sapphire diaphragm full-frequency dynamic driver promises a thump that rivals even the most sought-after over-ear headphones.

    These earbuds support LDAC lossless high-resolution audioand an advanced high-end Bluetooth SOC chipset that enables highly efficient performance with stable Bluetooth V5.3 connectivity. A low-latency rating of 55ms means the buds are ideal for the odd gaming session, playing highly competitive FPS titles. The Moondrop UltraSonic features wide-band Active Noise Cancellationpowered by advanced Single-Feedforward ANC technology. Leveraging a next-generation flagship SoC chipset and refined acoustic engineering, it delivers robust noise-cancellation performance. The transparency mode has also been enhanced, precisely tuned to better amplify human voices and ambient sounds. Additionally, the upgraded MitsuYuki voice prompts offer a more intuitive and seamless user experience for connectivity and operation.

    The earbuds are very comfortable to wear for long listening sessions and the passive noise isolation is also good. Battery life on the buds is also acceptable, with 6 hours on the buds and an additional 18 hours with the charging case. The only complaints being the plastic housing of the earbuds and case, and the average battery life, which might not be deal breakers for users. In more ways than not, the Ultrasonic earbuds are a worthy successor to the Space Travel buds. Carrying a price tag of make them well worth the investment and a deal maker even with the little disadvantages.

    The post Retro Modern Moondrop Ultrasonic earbuds will be the perfect pair for a Mission to Mars first appeared on Yanko Design.
    #retro #modern #moondrop #ultrasonic #earbuds
    Retro Modern Moondrop Ultrasonic earbuds will be the perfect pair for a Mission to Mars
    There are wireless earbuds in tons on the market – virtually leaving you frustrated which one fits your requirements the closest. The recent trend of see-through earbuds has caught up with the early adopters who love the visual intricacy of rejoicing the innards of their loved gadgets. Nothing sparked off this long-buried fad with their maiden earbuds that caught world’s attention. The Arctis GameBuds Glorange makes you fall in love while the Moondrop Pill tingles your compulsive instinct to make the purchase right away. Somewehre in between these two options sits the Moondrop’s another pair of earbuds that has gone under the radar but is no slouch by any stretch of imagination. Perfect for space phantasy enthusiasts, the pair has a retro-modern charm with the impressive specifications that will interest audiophiles. Designer: Moondrop Moondrop Ultrasonic is a pair of earbuds in contention for being one of the most balanced visual pleasers. It is a hybrid between a see-through look and the sci-fi aesthetic dominated pair of buds. The dual-driver hybrid TWS tuned by professional engineers has a combination of DD+BA drivers on each side to deliver high-quality sound. Add to the equation a FRA Lithium-Magnesium alloy balanced armature tweeter and your search for a natural sounding high frequency spectrum is a given. The 13mm sapphire diaphragm full-frequency dynamic driver promises a thump that rivals even the most sought-after over-ear headphones. These earbuds support LDAC lossless high-resolution audioand an advanced high-end Bluetooth SOC chipset that enables highly efficient performance with stable Bluetooth V5.3 connectivity. A low-latency rating of 55ms means the buds are ideal for the odd gaming session, playing highly competitive FPS titles. The Moondrop UltraSonic features wide-band Active Noise Cancellationpowered by advanced Single-Feedforward ANC technology. Leveraging a next-generation flagship SoC chipset and refined acoustic engineering, it delivers robust noise-cancellation performance. The transparency mode has also been enhanced, precisely tuned to better amplify human voices and ambient sounds. Additionally, the upgraded MitsuYuki voice prompts offer a more intuitive and seamless user experience for connectivity and operation. The earbuds are very comfortable to wear for long listening sessions and the passive noise isolation is also good. Battery life on the buds is also acceptable, with 6 hours on the buds and an additional 18 hours with the charging case. The only complaints being the plastic housing of the earbuds and case, and the average battery life, which might not be deal breakers for users. In more ways than not, the Ultrasonic earbuds are a worthy successor to the Space Travel buds. Carrying a price tag of make them well worth the investment and a deal maker even with the little disadvantages. The post Retro Modern Moondrop Ultrasonic earbuds will be the perfect pair for a Mission to Mars first appeared on Yanko Design. #retro #modern #moondrop #ultrasonic #earbuds
    WWW.YANKODESIGN.COM
    Retro Modern Moondrop Ultrasonic earbuds will be the perfect pair for a Mission to Mars
    There are wireless earbuds in tons on the market – virtually leaving you frustrated which one fits your requirements the closest. The recent trend of see-through earbuds has caught up with the early adopters who love the visual intricacy of rejoicing the innards of their loved gadgets. Nothing sparked off this long-buried fad with their maiden earbuds that caught world’s attention. The Arctis GameBuds Glorange makes you fall in love while the Moondrop Pill tingles your compulsive instinct to make the purchase right away. Somewehre in between these two options sits the Moondrop’s another pair of earbuds that has gone under the radar but is no slouch by any stretch of imagination. Perfect for space phantasy enthusiasts, the pair has a retro-modern charm with the impressive specifications that will interest audiophiles. Designer: Moondrop Moondrop Ultrasonic is a pair of earbuds in contention for being one of the most balanced visual pleasers. It is a hybrid between a see-through look and the sci-fi aesthetic dominated pair of buds. The dual-driver hybrid TWS tuned by professional engineers has a combination of DD+BA drivers on each side to deliver high-quality sound. Add to the equation a FRA Lithium-Magnesium alloy balanced armature tweeter and your search for a natural sounding high frequency spectrum is a given. The 13mm sapphire diaphragm full-frequency dynamic driver promises a thump that rivals even the most sought-after over-ear headphones. These earbuds support LDAC lossless high-resolution audio ( 24-Bit/96kHz) and an advanced high-end Bluetooth SOC chipset that enables highly efficient performance with stable Bluetooth V5.3 connectivity. A low-latency rating of 55ms means the buds are ideal for the odd gaming session, playing highly competitive FPS titles. The Moondrop UltraSonic features wide-band Active Noise Cancellation (ANC) powered by advanced Single-Feedforward ANC technology. Leveraging a next-generation flagship SoC chipset and refined acoustic engineering, it delivers robust noise-cancellation performance. The transparency mode has also been enhanced, precisely tuned to better amplify human voices and ambient sounds. Additionally, the upgraded MitsuYuki voice prompts offer a more intuitive and seamless user experience for connectivity and operation. The earbuds are very comfortable to wear for long listening sessions and the passive noise isolation is also good. Battery life on the buds is also acceptable, with 6 hours on the buds and an additional 18 hours with the charging case. The only complaints being the plastic housing of the earbuds and case, and the average battery life, which might not be deal breakers for users. In more ways than not, the Ultrasonic earbuds are a worthy successor to the Space Travel buds. Carrying a price tag of $75 make them well worth the investment and a deal maker even with the little disadvantages. The post Retro Modern Moondrop Ultrasonic earbuds will be the perfect pair for a Mission to Mars first appeared on Yanko Design.
    0 Yorumlar 0 hisse senetleri
  • Meta hypes AI friends as social media’s future, but users want real connections

    Friend requests

    Meta hypes AI friends as social media’s future, but users want real connections

    Two visions for social media’s future pit real connections against AI friends.

    Ashley Belanger



    May 21, 2025 9:38 am

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    If you ask the man who has largely shaped how friends and family connect on social media over the past two decades about the future of social media, you may not get a straight answer.
    At the Federal Trade Commission's monopoly trial, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attempted what seemed like an artful dodge to avoid criticism that his company allegedly bought out rivals Instagram and WhatsApp to lock users into Meta's family of apps so they would never post about their personal lives anywhere else. He testified that people actually engage with social media less often these days to connect with loved ones, preferring instead to discover entertaining content on platforms to share in private messages with friends and family.
    As Zuckerberg spins it, Meta no longer perceives much advantage in dominating the so-called personal social networking market where Facebook made its name and cemented what the FTC alleged is an illegal monopoly.
    "Mark Zuckerberg says social media is over," a New Yorker headline said about this testimony in a report noting a Meta chart that seemed to back up Zuckerberg's words. That chart, shared at the trial, showed the "percent of time spent viewing content posted by 'friends'" had declined over the past two years, from 22 to 17 percent on Facebook and from 11 to 7 percent on Instagram.
    Supposedly because of this trend, Zuckerberg testified that "it doesn't matter much" if someone's friends are on their preferred platform. Every platform has its own value as a discovery engine, Zuckerberg suggested. And Meta platforms increasingly compete on this new playing field against rivals like TikTok, Meta argued, while insisting that it's not so much focused on beating the FTC's flagged rivals in the connecting-friends-and-family business, Snap and MeWe.
    But while Zuckerberg claims that hosting that kind of content doesn't move the needle much anymore, owning the biggest platforms that people use daily to connect with friends and family obviously still matters to Meta, MeWe founder Mark Weinstein told Ars. And Meta's own press releases seem to back that up.

    Weeks ahead of Zuckerberg's testimony, Meta announced that it would bring back the "magic of friends," introducing a "friends" tab to Facebook to make user experiences more like the original Facebook. The company intentionally diluted feeds with creator content and ads for the past two years, but it now appears intent on trying to spark more real conversations between friends and family, at least partly to fuel its newly launched AI chatbots.
    Those chatbots mine personal information shared on Facebook and Instagram, and Meta wants to use that data to connect more personally with users—but "in a very creepy way," The Washington Post wrote. In interviews, Zuckerberg has suggested these AI friends could "meaningfully" fill the void of real friendship online, as the average person has only three friends but "has demand" for up to 15. To critics seeking to undo Meta's alleged monopoly, this latest move could signal a contradiction in Zuckerberg's testimony, showing that the company is so invested in keeping users on its platforms that it's now creating AI friendsto bait the loneliest among us into more engagement.
    "The average person wants more connectivity, connection, than they have," Zuckerberg said, hyping AI friends. For the Facebook founder, it must be hard to envision a future where his platforms aren't the answer to providing that basic social need. All this comes more than a decade after he sought billion in Facebook's 2012 initial public offering so that he could keep building tools that he told investors would expand "people's capacity to build and maintain relationships."
    At the trial, Zuckerberg testified that AI and augmented reality will be key fixtures of Meta's platforms in the future, predicting that "several years from now, you are going to be scrolling through your feed, and not only is it going to be sort of animated, but it will be interactive."

    Meta declined to comment further on the company's vision for social media's future. In a statement, a Meta spokesperson told Ars that "the FTC’s lawsuit against Meta defies reality," claiming that it threatens US leadership in AI and insisting that evidence at trial would establish that platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and X are Meta's true rivals.
    "More than 10 years after the FTC reviewed and cleared our acquisitions, the Commission’s action in this case sends the message that no deal is ever truly final," Meta's spokesperson said. "Regulators should be supporting American innovation rather than seeking to break up a great American company and further advantaging China on critical issues like AI.”

    Meta faces calls to open up its platforms
    Weinstein, the MeWe founder, told Ars that back in the 1990s when the original social media founders were planning the first community portals, "it was so beautiful because we didn't think about bots and trolls. We didn't think about data mining and surveillance capitalism. We thought about making the world a more connected and holistic place."
    But those who became social media overlords found more money in walled gardens and increasingly cut off attempts by outside developers to improve the biggest platforms' functionality or leverage their platforms to compete for their users' attention. Born of this era, Weinstein expects that Zuckerberg, and therefore Meta, will always cling to its friends-and-family roots, no matter which way Zuckerberg says the wind is blowing.
    Meta "is still entirely based on personal social networking," Weinstein told Ars.
    In a Newsweek op-ed, Weinstein explained that he left MeWe in 2021 after "competition became impossible" with Meta. It was a time when MeWe faced backlash over lax content moderation, drawing comparisons between its service and right-wing apps like Gab or Parler. Weinstein rejected those comparisons, seeing his platform as an ideal Facebook rival and remaining a board member through the app's more recent shift to decentralization. Still defending MeWe's failed efforts to beat Facebook, he submitted hundreds of documents and was deposed in the monopoly trial, alleging that Meta retaliated against MeWe as a privacy-focused rival that sought to woo users away by branding itself the "anti-Facebook."

    Among his complaints, Weinstein accused Meta of thwarting MeWe's attempts to introduce interoperability between the two platforms, which he thinks stems from a fear that users might leave Facebook if they discover a more appealing platform. That’s why he's urged the FTC—if it wins its monopoly case—to go beyond simply ordering a potential breakup of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to also require interoperability between Meta's platforms and all rivals. That may be the only way to force Meta to release its clutch on personal data collection, Weinstein suggested, and allow for more competition broadly in the social media industry.
    "The glue that holds it all together is Facebook’s monopoly over data," Weinstein wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, recalling the moment he realized that Meta seemed to have an unbeatable monopoly. "Its ownership and control of the personal information of Facebook users and non-users alike is unmatched."
    Cory Doctorow, a special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Ars that his vision of a better social media future goes even further than requiring interoperability between all platforms. Social networks like Meta's should also be made to allow reverse engineering so that outside developers can modify their apps with third-party tools without risking legal attacks, he said.
    Doctorow said that solution would create "an equilibrium where companies are more incentivized to behave themselves than they are to cheat" by, say, retaliating against, killing off, or buying out rivals. And "if they fail to respond to that incentive and they cheat anyways, then the rest of the world still has a remedy," Doctorow said, by having the choice to modify or ditch any platform deemed toxic, invasive, manipulative, or otherwise offensive.
    Doctorow summed up the frustration that some users have faced through the ongoing "enshittification" of platformsever since platforms took over the Internet.

    "I'm 55 now, and I've gotten a lot less interested in how things work because I've had too many experiences with how things fail," Doctorow told Ars. "And I just want to make sure that if I'm on a service and it goes horribly wrong, I can leave."
    Social media haters wish OG platforms were doomed
    Weinstein pointed out that Meta's alleged monopoly impacts a group often left out of social media debates: non-users. And if you ask someone who hates social media what the future of social media should look like, they will not mince words: They want a way to opt out of all of it.
    As Meta's monopoly trial got underway, a personal blog post titled "No Instagram, no privacy" rose to the front page of Hacker News, prompting a discussion about social media norms and reasonable expectations for privacy in 2025.

    In the post, Wouter-Jan Leys, a privacy advocate, explained that he felt "blessed" to have "somehow escaped having an Instagram account," feeling no pressure to "update the abstract audience of everyone I ever connected with online on where I am, what I am doing, or who I am hanging out with."
    But despite never having an account, he's found that "you don’t have to be on Instagram to be on Instagram," complaining that "it bugs me" when friends seem to know "more about my life than I tell them" because of various friends' posts that mention or show images of him. In his blog, he defined privacy as "being in control of what other people know about you" and suggested that because of platforms like Instagram, he currently lacked this control. There should be some way to "fix or regulate this," Leys suggested, or maybe some universal "etiquette where it’s frowned upon to post about social gatherings to any audience beyond who already was at that gathering."

    On Hacker News, his post spurred a debate over one of the longest-running privacy questions swirling on social media: Is it OK to post about someone who abstains from social media?
    Some seeming social media fans scolded Leys for being so old-fashioned about social media, suggesting, "just live your life without being so bothered about offending other people" or saying that "the entire world doesn't have to be sanitized to meet individual people's preferences." Others seemed to better understand Leys' point of view, with one agreeing that "the problem is that our modern normslead to everyone sharing everything with a large social network."
    Surveying the lively thread, another social media hater joked, "I feel vindicated for my decision to entirely stay off of this drama machine."
    Leys told Ars that he would "absolutely" be in favor of personal social networks like Meta's platforms dying off or losing steam, as Zuckerberg suggested they already are. He thinks that the decline in personal post engagement that Meta is seeing is likely due to a combination of factors, where some users may prefer more privacy now after years of broadcasting their lives, and others may be tired of the pressure of building a personal brand or experiencing other "odd social dynamics."
    Setting user sentiments aside, Meta is also responsible for people engaging with fewer of their friends' posts. Meta announced that it would double the amount of force-fed filler in people's feeds on Instagram and Facebook starting in 2023. That's when the two-year span begins that Zuckerberg measured in testifying about the sudden drop-off in friends' content engagement.
    So while it's easy to say the market changed, Meta may be obscuring how much it shaped that shift. Degrading the newsfeed and changing Instagram's default post shape from square to rectangle seemingly significantly shifted Instagram social norms, for example, creating an environment where Gen Z users felt less comfortable posting as prolifically as millennials did when Instagram debuted, The New Yorker explained last year. Where once millennials painstakingly designed immaculate grids of individual eye-catching photos to seem cool online, Gen Z users told The New Yorker that posting a single photo now feels "humiliating" and like a "social risk."

    But rather than eliminate the impulse to post, this cultural shift has popularized a different form of personal posting: staggered photo dumps, where users wait to post a variety of photos together to sum up a month of events or curate a vibe, the trend piece explained. And Meta is clearly intent on fueling that momentum, doubling the maximum number of photos that users can feature in a single post to encourage even more social posting, The New Yorker noted.
    Brendan Benedict, an attorney for Benedict Law Group PLLC who has helped litigate big tech antitrust cases, is monitoring the FTC monopoly trial on a Substack called Big Tech on Trial. He told Ars that the evidence at the trial has shown that "consumers want more friends and family content, and Meta is belatedly trying to address this" with features like the "friends" tab, while claiming there's less interest in this content.
    Leys doesn't think social media—at least the way that Facebook defined it in the mid-2000s—will ever die, because people will never stop wanting social networks like Facebook or Instagram to stay connected with all their friends and family. But he could see a world where, if people ever started truly caring about privacy or "indeedtired of the social dynamics and personal brand-building... the kind of social media like Facebook and Instagram will have been a generational phenomenon, and they may not immediately bounce back," especially if it's easy to switch to other platforms that respond better to user preferences.
    He also agreed that requiring interoperability would likely lead to better social media products, but he maintained that "it would still not get me on Instagram."

    Interoperability shakes up social media
    Meta thought it may have already beaten the FTC's monopoly case, filing for a motion for summary judgment after the FTC rested its case in a bid to end the trial early. That dream was quickly dashed when the judge denied the motion days later. But no matter the outcome of the trial, Meta's influence over the social media world may be waning just as it's facing increasing pressure to open up its platforms more than ever.

    The FTC has alleged that Meta weaponized platform access early on, only allowing certain companies to interoperate and denying access to anyone perceived as a threat to its alleged monopoly power. That includes limiting promotions of Instagram to keep users engaged with Facebook Blue. A primary concern for Meta, the FTC claimed, was avoiding "training users to check multiple feeds," which might allow other apps to "cannibalize" its users.
    "Facebook has used this power to deter and suppress competitive threats to its personal social networking monopoly. In order to protect its monopoly, Facebook adopted and required developers to agree to conditional dealing policies that limited third-party apps’ ability to engage with Facebook rivals or to develop into rivals themselves," the FTC alleged.
    By 2011, the FTC alleged, then-Facebook had begun terminating API access to any developers that made it easier to export user data into a competing social network without Facebook's permission. That practice only ended when the UK parliament started calling out Facebook’s anticompetitive conduct toward app developers in 2018, the FTC alleged.
    According to the FTC, Meta continues "to this day" to "screen developers and can weaponize API access in ways that cement its dominance," and if scrutiny ever subsides, Meta is expected to return to such anticompetitive practices as the AI race heats up.
    One potential hurdle for Meta could be that the push for interoperability is not just coming from the FTC or lawmakers who recently reintroduced bipartisan legislation to end walled gardens. Doctorow told Ars that "huge public groundswells of mistrust and anger about excessive corporate power" that "cross political lines" are prompting global antitrust probes into big tech companies and are perhaps finally forcing a reckoning after years of degrading popular products to chase higher and higher revenues.

    For social media companies, mounting concerns about privacy and suspicions about content manipulation or censorship are driving public distrust, Doctorow said, as well as fears of surveillance capitalism. The latter includes theories that Doctorow is skeptical of. Weinstein embraced them, though, warning that platforms seem to be profiting off data without consent while brainwashing users.
    Allowing users to leave the platform without losing access to their friends, their social posts, and their messages might be the best way to incentivize Meta to either genuinely compete for billions of users or lose them forever as better options pop up that can plug into their networks.
    In his Newsweek op-ed, Weinstein suggested that web inventor Tim Berners-Lee has already invented a working protocol "to enable people to own, upload, download, and relocate their social graphs," which maps users' connections across platforms. That could be used to mitigate "the network effect" that locks users into platforms like Meta's "while interrupting unwanted data collection."
    At the same time, Doctorow told Ars that increasingly popular decentralized platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon already provide interoperability and are next looking into "building interoperable gateways" between their services. Doctorow said that communicating with other users across platforms may feel "awkward" at first, but ultimately, it may be like "having to find the diesel pump at the gas station" instead of the unleaded gas pump. "You'll still be going to the same gas station," Doctorow suggested.
    Opening up gateways into all platforms could be useful in the future, Doctorow suggested. Imagine if one platform goes down—it would no longer disrupt communications as drastically, as users could just pivot to communicate on another platform and reach the same audience. The same goes for platforms that users grow to distrust.

    The EFF supports regulators' attempts to pass well-crafted interoperability mandates, Doctorow said, noting that "if you have to worry about your users leaving, you generally have to treat them better."

    But would interoperability fix social media?
    The FTC has alleged that "Facebook’s dominant position in the US personal social networking market is durable due to significant entry barriers, including direct network effects and high switching costs."
    Meta disputes the FTC's complaint as outdated, arguing that its platform could be substituted by pretty much any social network.
    However, Guy Aridor, a co-author of a recent article called "The Economics of Social Media" in the Journal of Economic Literature, told Ars that dominant platforms are probably threatened by shifting social media trends and are likely to remain "resistant to interoperability" because "it’s in the interest of the platform to make switching and coordination costs high so that users are less likely to migrate away." For Meta, research shows its platforms' network effects have appeared to weaken somewhat but "clearly still exist" despite social media users increasingly seeking content on platforms rather than just socialization, Aridor said.
    Interoperability advocates believe it will make it easier for startups to compete with giants like Meta, which fight hard and sometimes seemingly dirty to keep users on their apps. Reintroducing the ACCESS Act, which requires platform compatibility to enable service switching, Senator Mark R. Warnersaid that "interoperability and portability are powerful tools to promote innovative new companies and limit anti-competitive behaviors." He's hoping that passing these "long-overdue requirements" will "boost competition and give consumers more power."
    Aridor told Ars it's obvious that "interoperability would clearly increase competition," but he still has questions about whether users would benefit from that competition "since one consistent theme is that these platforms are optimized to maximize engagement, and there’s numerous empirical evidence we have by now that engagement isn’t necessarily correlated with utility."

    Consider, Aridor suggested, how toxic content often leads to high engagement but lower user satisfaction, as MeWe experienced during its 2021 backlash.
    Aridor said there is currently "very little empirical evidence on the effects of interoperability," but theoretically, if it increased competition in the current climate, it would likely "push the market more toward supplying engaging entertainment-related content as opposed to friends and family type of content."
    Benedict told Ars that a remedy like interoperability would likely only be useful to combat Meta's alleged monopoly following a breakup, which he views as the "natural remedy" following a potential win in the FTC's lawsuit.
    Without the breakup and other meaningful reforms, a Meta win could preserve the status quo and see the company never open up its platforms, perhaps perpetuating Meta's influence over social media well into the future. And if Zuckerberg's vision comes to pass, instead of seeing what your friends are posting on interoperating platforms across the Internet, you may have a dozen AI friends trained on your real friends' behaviors sending you regular dopamine hits to keep you scrolling on Facebook or Instagram.
    Aridor's team's article suggested that, regardless of user preferences, social media remains a permanent fixture of society. If that's true, users could get stuck forever using whichever platforms connect them with the widest range of contacts.
    "While social media has continued to evolve, one thing that has not changed is that social media remains a central part of people’s lives," his team's article concluded.

    Ashley Belanger
    Senior Policy Reporter

    Ashley Belanger
    Senior Policy Reporter

    Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

    1 Comments
    #meta #hypes #friends #social #medias
    Meta hypes AI friends as social media’s future, but users want real connections
    Friend requests Meta hypes AI friends as social media’s future, but users want real connections Two visions for social media’s future pit real connections against AI friends. Ashley Belanger – May 21, 2025 9:38 am | 1 Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more If you ask the man who has largely shaped how friends and family connect on social media over the past two decades about the future of social media, you may not get a straight answer. At the Federal Trade Commission's monopoly trial, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attempted what seemed like an artful dodge to avoid criticism that his company allegedly bought out rivals Instagram and WhatsApp to lock users into Meta's family of apps so they would never post about their personal lives anywhere else. He testified that people actually engage with social media less often these days to connect with loved ones, preferring instead to discover entertaining content on platforms to share in private messages with friends and family. As Zuckerberg spins it, Meta no longer perceives much advantage in dominating the so-called personal social networking market where Facebook made its name and cemented what the FTC alleged is an illegal monopoly. "Mark Zuckerberg says social media is over," a New Yorker headline said about this testimony in a report noting a Meta chart that seemed to back up Zuckerberg's words. That chart, shared at the trial, showed the "percent of time spent viewing content posted by 'friends'" had declined over the past two years, from 22 to 17 percent on Facebook and from 11 to 7 percent on Instagram. Supposedly because of this trend, Zuckerberg testified that "it doesn't matter much" if someone's friends are on their preferred platform. Every platform has its own value as a discovery engine, Zuckerberg suggested. And Meta platforms increasingly compete on this new playing field against rivals like TikTok, Meta argued, while insisting that it's not so much focused on beating the FTC's flagged rivals in the connecting-friends-and-family business, Snap and MeWe. But while Zuckerberg claims that hosting that kind of content doesn't move the needle much anymore, owning the biggest platforms that people use daily to connect with friends and family obviously still matters to Meta, MeWe founder Mark Weinstein told Ars. And Meta's own press releases seem to back that up. Weeks ahead of Zuckerberg's testimony, Meta announced that it would bring back the "magic of friends," introducing a "friends" tab to Facebook to make user experiences more like the original Facebook. The company intentionally diluted feeds with creator content and ads for the past two years, but it now appears intent on trying to spark more real conversations between friends and family, at least partly to fuel its newly launched AI chatbots. Those chatbots mine personal information shared on Facebook and Instagram, and Meta wants to use that data to connect more personally with users—but "in a very creepy way," The Washington Post wrote. In interviews, Zuckerberg has suggested these AI friends could "meaningfully" fill the void of real friendship online, as the average person has only three friends but "has demand" for up to 15. To critics seeking to undo Meta's alleged monopoly, this latest move could signal a contradiction in Zuckerberg's testimony, showing that the company is so invested in keeping users on its platforms that it's now creating AI friendsto bait the loneliest among us into more engagement. "The average person wants more connectivity, connection, than they have," Zuckerberg said, hyping AI friends. For the Facebook founder, it must be hard to envision a future where his platforms aren't the answer to providing that basic social need. All this comes more than a decade after he sought billion in Facebook's 2012 initial public offering so that he could keep building tools that he told investors would expand "people's capacity to build and maintain relationships." At the trial, Zuckerberg testified that AI and augmented reality will be key fixtures of Meta's platforms in the future, predicting that "several years from now, you are going to be scrolling through your feed, and not only is it going to be sort of animated, but it will be interactive." Meta declined to comment further on the company's vision for social media's future. In a statement, a Meta spokesperson told Ars that "the FTC’s lawsuit against Meta defies reality," claiming that it threatens US leadership in AI and insisting that evidence at trial would establish that platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and X are Meta's true rivals. "More than 10 years after the FTC reviewed and cleared our acquisitions, the Commission’s action in this case sends the message that no deal is ever truly final," Meta's spokesperson said. "Regulators should be supporting American innovation rather than seeking to break up a great American company and further advantaging China on critical issues like AI.” Meta faces calls to open up its platforms Weinstein, the MeWe founder, told Ars that back in the 1990s when the original social media founders were planning the first community portals, "it was so beautiful because we didn't think about bots and trolls. We didn't think about data mining and surveillance capitalism. We thought about making the world a more connected and holistic place." But those who became social media overlords found more money in walled gardens and increasingly cut off attempts by outside developers to improve the biggest platforms' functionality or leverage their platforms to compete for their users' attention. Born of this era, Weinstein expects that Zuckerberg, and therefore Meta, will always cling to its friends-and-family roots, no matter which way Zuckerberg says the wind is blowing. Meta "is still entirely based on personal social networking," Weinstein told Ars. In a Newsweek op-ed, Weinstein explained that he left MeWe in 2021 after "competition became impossible" with Meta. It was a time when MeWe faced backlash over lax content moderation, drawing comparisons between its service and right-wing apps like Gab or Parler. Weinstein rejected those comparisons, seeing his platform as an ideal Facebook rival and remaining a board member through the app's more recent shift to decentralization. Still defending MeWe's failed efforts to beat Facebook, he submitted hundreds of documents and was deposed in the monopoly trial, alleging that Meta retaliated against MeWe as a privacy-focused rival that sought to woo users away by branding itself the "anti-Facebook." Among his complaints, Weinstein accused Meta of thwarting MeWe's attempts to introduce interoperability between the two platforms, which he thinks stems from a fear that users might leave Facebook if they discover a more appealing platform. That’s why he's urged the FTC—if it wins its monopoly case—to go beyond simply ordering a potential breakup of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to also require interoperability between Meta's platforms and all rivals. That may be the only way to force Meta to release its clutch on personal data collection, Weinstein suggested, and allow for more competition broadly in the social media industry. "The glue that holds it all together is Facebook’s monopoly over data," Weinstein wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, recalling the moment he realized that Meta seemed to have an unbeatable monopoly. "Its ownership and control of the personal information of Facebook users and non-users alike is unmatched." Cory Doctorow, a special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Ars that his vision of a better social media future goes even further than requiring interoperability between all platforms. Social networks like Meta's should also be made to allow reverse engineering so that outside developers can modify their apps with third-party tools without risking legal attacks, he said. Doctorow said that solution would create "an equilibrium where companies are more incentivized to behave themselves than they are to cheat" by, say, retaliating against, killing off, or buying out rivals. And "if they fail to respond to that incentive and they cheat anyways, then the rest of the world still has a remedy," Doctorow said, by having the choice to modify or ditch any platform deemed toxic, invasive, manipulative, or otherwise offensive. Doctorow summed up the frustration that some users have faced through the ongoing "enshittification" of platformsever since platforms took over the Internet. "I'm 55 now, and I've gotten a lot less interested in how things work because I've had too many experiences with how things fail," Doctorow told Ars. "And I just want to make sure that if I'm on a service and it goes horribly wrong, I can leave." Social media haters wish OG platforms were doomed Weinstein pointed out that Meta's alleged monopoly impacts a group often left out of social media debates: non-users. And if you ask someone who hates social media what the future of social media should look like, they will not mince words: They want a way to opt out of all of it. As Meta's monopoly trial got underway, a personal blog post titled "No Instagram, no privacy" rose to the front page of Hacker News, prompting a discussion about social media norms and reasonable expectations for privacy in 2025. In the post, Wouter-Jan Leys, a privacy advocate, explained that he felt "blessed" to have "somehow escaped having an Instagram account," feeling no pressure to "update the abstract audience of everyone I ever connected with online on where I am, what I am doing, or who I am hanging out with." But despite never having an account, he's found that "you don’t have to be on Instagram to be on Instagram," complaining that "it bugs me" when friends seem to know "more about my life than I tell them" because of various friends' posts that mention or show images of him. In his blog, he defined privacy as "being in control of what other people know about you" and suggested that because of platforms like Instagram, he currently lacked this control. There should be some way to "fix or regulate this," Leys suggested, or maybe some universal "etiquette where it’s frowned upon to post about social gatherings to any audience beyond who already was at that gathering." On Hacker News, his post spurred a debate over one of the longest-running privacy questions swirling on social media: Is it OK to post about someone who abstains from social media? Some seeming social media fans scolded Leys for being so old-fashioned about social media, suggesting, "just live your life without being so bothered about offending other people" or saying that "the entire world doesn't have to be sanitized to meet individual people's preferences." Others seemed to better understand Leys' point of view, with one agreeing that "the problem is that our modern normslead to everyone sharing everything with a large social network." Surveying the lively thread, another social media hater joked, "I feel vindicated for my decision to entirely stay off of this drama machine." Leys told Ars that he would "absolutely" be in favor of personal social networks like Meta's platforms dying off or losing steam, as Zuckerberg suggested they already are. He thinks that the decline in personal post engagement that Meta is seeing is likely due to a combination of factors, where some users may prefer more privacy now after years of broadcasting their lives, and others may be tired of the pressure of building a personal brand or experiencing other "odd social dynamics." Setting user sentiments aside, Meta is also responsible for people engaging with fewer of their friends' posts. Meta announced that it would double the amount of force-fed filler in people's feeds on Instagram and Facebook starting in 2023. That's when the two-year span begins that Zuckerberg measured in testifying about the sudden drop-off in friends' content engagement. So while it's easy to say the market changed, Meta may be obscuring how much it shaped that shift. Degrading the newsfeed and changing Instagram's default post shape from square to rectangle seemingly significantly shifted Instagram social norms, for example, creating an environment where Gen Z users felt less comfortable posting as prolifically as millennials did when Instagram debuted, The New Yorker explained last year. Where once millennials painstakingly designed immaculate grids of individual eye-catching photos to seem cool online, Gen Z users told The New Yorker that posting a single photo now feels "humiliating" and like a "social risk." But rather than eliminate the impulse to post, this cultural shift has popularized a different form of personal posting: staggered photo dumps, where users wait to post a variety of photos together to sum up a month of events or curate a vibe, the trend piece explained. And Meta is clearly intent on fueling that momentum, doubling the maximum number of photos that users can feature in a single post to encourage even more social posting, The New Yorker noted. Brendan Benedict, an attorney for Benedict Law Group PLLC who has helped litigate big tech antitrust cases, is monitoring the FTC monopoly trial on a Substack called Big Tech on Trial. He told Ars that the evidence at the trial has shown that "consumers want more friends and family content, and Meta is belatedly trying to address this" with features like the "friends" tab, while claiming there's less interest in this content. Leys doesn't think social media—at least the way that Facebook defined it in the mid-2000s—will ever die, because people will never stop wanting social networks like Facebook or Instagram to stay connected with all their friends and family. But he could see a world where, if people ever started truly caring about privacy or "indeedtired of the social dynamics and personal brand-building... the kind of social media like Facebook and Instagram will have been a generational phenomenon, and they may not immediately bounce back," especially if it's easy to switch to other platforms that respond better to user preferences. He also agreed that requiring interoperability would likely lead to better social media products, but he maintained that "it would still not get me on Instagram." Interoperability shakes up social media Meta thought it may have already beaten the FTC's monopoly case, filing for a motion for summary judgment after the FTC rested its case in a bid to end the trial early. That dream was quickly dashed when the judge denied the motion days later. But no matter the outcome of the trial, Meta's influence over the social media world may be waning just as it's facing increasing pressure to open up its platforms more than ever. The FTC has alleged that Meta weaponized platform access early on, only allowing certain companies to interoperate and denying access to anyone perceived as a threat to its alleged monopoly power. That includes limiting promotions of Instagram to keep users engaged with Facebook Blue. A primary concern for Meta, the FTC claimed, was avoiding "training users to check multiple feeds," which might allow other apps to "cannibalize" its users. "Facebook has used this power to deter and suppress competitive threats to its personal social networking monopoly. In order to protect its monopoly, Facebook adopted and required developers to agree to conditional dealing policies that limited third-party apps’ ability to engage with Facebook rivals or to develop into rivals themselves," the FTC alleged. By 2011, the FTC alleged, then-Facebook had begun terminating API access to any developers that made it easier to export user data into a competing social network without Facebook's permission. That practice only ended when the UK parliament started calling out Facebook’s anticompetitive conduct toward app developers in 2018, the FTC alleged. According to the FTC, Meta continues "to this day" to "screen developers and can weaponize API access in ways that cement its dominance," and if scrutiny ever subsides, Meta is expected to return to such anticompetitive practices as the AI race heats up. One potential hurdle for Meta could be that the push for interoperability is not just coming from the FTC or lawmakers who recently reintroduced bipartisan legislation to end walled gardens. Doctorow told Ars that "huge public groundswells of mistrust and anger about excessive corporate power" that "cross political lines" are prompting global antitrust probes into big tech companies and are perhaps finally forcing a reckoning after years of degrading popular products to chase higher and higher revenues. For social media companies, mounting concerns about privacy and suspicions about content manipulation or censorship are driving public distrust, Doctorow said, as well as fears of surveillance capitalism. The latter includes theories that Doctorow is skeptical of. Weinstein embraced them, though, warning that platforms seem to be profiting off data without consent while brainwashing users. Allowing users to leave the platform without losing access to their friends, their social posts, and their messages might be the best way to incentivize Meta to either genuinely compete for billions of users or lose them forever as better options pop up that can plug into their networks. In his Newsweek op-ed, Weinstein suggested that web inventor Tim Berners-Lee has already invented a working protocol "to enable people to own, upload, download, and relocate their social graphs," which maps users' connections across platforms. That could be used to mitigate "the network effect" that locks users into platforms like Meta's "while interrupting unwanted data collection." At the same time, Doctorow told Ars that increasingly popular decentralized platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon already provide interoperability and are next looking into "building interoperable gateways" between their services. Doctorow said that communicating with other users across platforms may feel "awkward" at first, but ultimately, it may be like "having to find the diesel pump at the gas station" instead of the unleaded gas pump. "You'll still be going to the same gas station," Doctorow suggested. Opening up gateways into all platforms could be useful in the future, Doctorow suggested. Imagine if one platform goes down—it would no longer disrupt communications as drastically, as users could just pivot to communicate on another platform and reach the same audience. The same goes for platforms that users grow to distrust. The EFF supports regulators' attempts to pass well-crafted interoperability mandates, Doctorow said, noting that "if you have to worry about your users leaving, you generally have to treat them better." But would interoperability fix social media? The FTC has alleged that "Facebook’s dominant position in the US personal social networking market is durable due to significant entry barriers, including direct network effects and high switching costs." Meta disputes the FTC's complaint as outdated, arguing that its platform could be substituted by pretty much any social network. However, Guy Aridor, a co-author of a recent article called "The Economics of Social Media" in the Journal of Economic Literature, told Ars that dominant platforms are probably threatened by shifting social media trends and are likely to remain "resistant to interoperability" because "it’s in the interest of the platform to make switching and coordination costs high so that users are less likely to migrate away." For Meta, research shows its platforms' network effects have appeared to weaken somewhat but "clearly still exist" despite social media users increasingly seeking content on platforms rather than just socialization, Aridor said. Interoperability advocates believe it will make it easier for startups to compete with giants like Meta, which fight hard and sometimes seemingly dirty to keep users on their apps. Reintroducing the ACCESS Act, which requires platform compatibility to enable service switching, Senator Mark R. Warnersaid that "interoperability and portability are powerful tools to promote innovative new companies and limit anti-competitive behaviors." He's hoping that passing these "long-overdue requirements" will "boost competition and give consumers more power." Aridor told Ars it's obvious that "interoperability would clearly increase competition," but he still has questions about whether users would benefit from that competition "since one consistent theme is that these platforms are optimized to maximize engagement, and there’s numerous empirical evidence we have by now that engagement isn’t necessarily correlated with utility." Consider, Aridor suggested, how toxic content often leads to high engagement but lower user satisfaction, as MeWe experienced during its 2021 backlash. Aridor said there is currently "very little empirical evidence on the effects of interoperability," but theoretically, if it increased competition in the current climate, it would likely "push the market more toward supplying engaging entertainment-related content as opposed to friends and family type of content." Benedict told Ars that a remedy like interoperability would likely only be useful to combat Meta's alleged monopoly following a breakup, which he views as the "natural remedy" following a potential win in the FTC's lawsuit. Without the breakup and other meaningful reforms, a Meta win could preserve the status quo and see the company never open up its platforms, perhaps perpetuating Meta's influence over social media well into the future. And if Zuckerberg's vision comes to pass, instead of seeing what your friends are posting on interoperating platforms across the Internet, you may have a dozen AI friends trained on your real friends' behaviors sending you regular dopamine hits to keep you scrolling on Facebook or Instagram. Aridor's team's article suggested that, regardless of user preferences, social media remains a permanent fixture of society. If that's true, users could get stuck forever using whichever platforms connect them with the widest range of contacts. "While social media has continued to evolve, one thing that has not changed is that social media remains a central part of people’s lives," his team's article concluded. Ashley Belanger Senior Policy Reporter Ashley Belanger Senior Policy Reporter Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience. 1 Comments #meta #hypes #friends #social #medias
    ARSTECHNICA.COM
    Meta hypes AI friends as social media’s future, but users want real connections
    Friend requests Meta hypes AI friends as social media’s future, but users want real connections Two visions for social media’s future pit real connections against AI friends. Ashley Belanger – May 21, 2025 9:38 am | 1 Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images Credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more If you ask the man who has largely shaped how friends and family connect on social media over the past two decades about the future of social media, you may not get a straight answer. At the Federal Trade Commission's monopoly trial, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attempted what seemed like an artful dodge to avoid criticism that his company allegedly bought out rivals Instagram and WhatsApp to lock users into Meta's family of apps so they would never post about their personal lives anywhere else. He testified that people actually engage with social media less often these days to connect with loved ones, preferring instead to discover entertaining content on platforms to share in private messages with friends and family. As Zuckerberg spins it, Meta no longer perceives much advantage in dominating the so-called personal social networking market where Facebook made its name and cemented what the FTC alleged is an illegal monopoly. "Mark Zuckerberg says social media is over," a New Yorker headline said about this testimony in a report noting a Meta chart that seemed to back up Zuckerberg's words. That chart, shared at the trial, showed the "percent of time spent viewing content posted by 'friends'" had declined over the past two years, from 22 to 17 percent on Facebook and from 11 to 7 percent on Instagram. Supposedly because of this trend, Zuckerberg testified that "it doesn't matter much" if someone's friends are on their preferred platform. Every platform has its own value as a discovery engine, Zuckerberg suggested. And Meta platforms increasingly compete on this new playing field against rivals like TikTok, Meta argued, while insisting that it's not so much focused on beating the FTC's flagged rivals in the connecting-friends-and-family business, Snap and MeWe. But while Zuckerberg claims that hosting that kind of content doesn't move the needle much anymore, owning the biggest platforms that people use daily to connect with friends and family obviously still matters to Meta, MeWe founder Mark Weinstein told Ars. And Meta's own press releases seem to back that up. Weeks ahead of Zuckerberg's testimony, Meta announced that it would bring back the "magic of friends," introducing a "friends" tab to Facebook to make user experiences more like the original Facebook. The company intentionally diluted feeds with creator content and ads for the past two years, but it now appears intent on trying to spark more real conversations between friends and family, at least partly to fuel its newly launched AI chatbots. Those chatbots mine personal information shared on Facebook and Instagram, and Meta wants to use that data to connect more personally with users—but "in a very creepy way," The Washington Post wrote. In interviews, Zuckerberg has suggested these AI friends could "meaningfully" fill the void of real friendship online, as the average person has only three friends but "has demand" for up to 15. To critics seeking to undo Meta's alleged monopoly, this latest move could signal a contradiction in Zuckerberg's testimony, showing that the company is so invested in keeping users on its platforms that it's now creating AI friends (wh0 can never leave its platform) to bait the loneliest among us into more engagement. "The average person wants more connectivity, connection, than they have," Zuckerberg said, hyping AI friends. For the Facebook founder, it must be hard to envision a future where his platforms aren't the answer to providing that basic social need. All this comes more than a decade after he sought $5 billion in Facebook's 2012 initial public offering so that he could keep building tools that he told investors would expand "people's capacity to build and maintain relationships." At the trial, Zuckerberg testified that AI and augmented reality will be key fixtures of Meta's platforms in the future, predicting that "several years from now, you are going to be scrolling through your feed, and not only is it going to be sort of animated, but it will be interactive." Meta declined to comment further on the company's vision for social media's future. In a statement, a Meta spokesperson told Ars that "the FTC’s lawsuit against Meta defies reality," claiming that it threatens US leadership in AI and insisting that evidence at trial would establish that platforms like TikTok, YouTube, and X are Meta's true rivals. "More than 10 years after the FTC reviewed and cleared our acquisitions, the Commission’s action in this case sends the message that no deal is ever truly final," Meta's spokesperson said. "Regulators should be supporting American innovation rather than seeking to break up a great American company and further advantaging China on critical issues like AI.” Meta faces calls to open up its platforms Weinstein, the MeWe founder, told Ars that back in the 1990s when the original social media founders were planning the first community portals, "it was so beautiful because we didn't think about bots and trolls. We didn't think about data mining and surveillance capitalism. We thought about making the world a more connected and holistic place." But those who became social media overlords found more money in walled gardens and increasingly cut off attempts by outside developers to improve the biggest platforms' functionality or leverage their platforms to compete for their users' attention. Born of this era, Weinstein expects that Zuckerberg, and therefore Meta, will always cling to its friends-and-family roots, no matter which way Zuckerberg says the wind is blowing. Meta "is still entirely based on personal social networking," Weinstein told Ars. In a Newsweek op-ed, Weinstein explained that he left MeWe in 2021 after "competition became impossible" with Meta. It was a time when MeWe faced backlash over lax content moderation, drawing comparisons between its service and right-wing apps like Gab or Parler. Weinstein rejected those comparisons, seeing his platform as an ideal Facebook rival and remaining a board member through the app's more recent shift to decentralization. Still defending MeWe's failed efforts to beat Facebook, he submitted hundreds of documents and was deposed in the monopoly trial, alleging that Meta retaliated against MeWe as a privacy-focused rival that sought to woo users away by branding itself the "anti-Facebook." Among his complaints, Weinstein accused Meta of thwarting MeWe's attempts to introduce interoperability between the two platforms, which he thinks stems from a fear that users might leave Facebook if they discover a more appealing platform. That’s why he's urged the FTC—if it wins its monopoly case—to go beyond simply ordering a potential breakup of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to also require interoperability between Meta's platforms and all rivals. That may be the only way to force Meta to release its clutch on personal data collection, Weinstein suggested, and allow for more competition broadly in the social media industry. "The glue that holds it all together is Facebook’s monopoly over data," Weinstein wrote in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, recalling the moment he realized that Meta seemed to have an unbeatable monopoly. "Its ownership and control of the personal information of Facebook users and non-users alike is unmatched." Cory Doctorow, a special advisor to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Ars that his vision of a better social media future goes even further than requiring interoperability between all platforms. Social networks like Meta's should also be made to allow reverse engineering so that outside developers can modify their apps with third-party tools without risking legal attacks, he said. Doctorow said that solution would create "an equilibrium where companies are more incentivized to behave themselves than they are to cheat" by, say, retaliating against, killing off, or buying out rivals. And "if they fail to respond to that incentive and they cheat anyways, then the rest of the world still has a remedy," Doctorow said, by having the choice to modify or ditch any platform deemed toxic, invasive, manipulative, or otherwise offensive. Doctorow summed up the frustration that some users have faced through the ongoing "enshittification" of platforms (a term he coined) ever since platforms took over the Internet. "I'm 55 now, and I've gotten a lot less interested in how things work because I've had too many experiences with how things fail," Doctorow told Ars. "And I just want to make sure that if I'm on a service and it goes horribly wrong, I can leave." Social media haters wish OG platforms were doomed Weinstein pointed out that Meta's alleged monopoly impacts a group often left out of social media debates: non-users. And if you ask someone who hates social media what the future of social media should look like, they will not mince words: They want a way to opt out of all of it. As Meta's monopoly trial got underway, a personal blog post titled "No Instagram, no privacy" rose to the front page of Hacker News, prompting a discussion about social media norms and reasonable expectations for privacy in 2025. In the post, Wouter-Jan Leys, a privacy advocate, explained that he felt "blessed" to have "somehow escaped having an Instagram account," feeling no pressure to "update the abstract audience of everyone I ever connected with online on where I am, what I am doing, or who I am hanging out with." But despite never having an account, he's found that "you don’t have to be on Instagram to be on Instagram," complaining that "it bugs me" when friends seem to know "more about my life than I tell them" because of various friends' posts that mention or show images of him. In his blog, he defined privacy as "being in control of what other people know about you" and suggested that because of platforms like Instagram, he currently lacked this control. There should be some way to "fix or regulate this," Leys suggested, or maybe some universal "etiquette where it’s frowned upon to post about social gatherings to any audience beyond who already was at that gathering." On Hacker News, his post spurred a debate over one of the longest-running privacy questions swirling on social media: Is it OK to post about someone who abstains from social media? Some seeming social media fans scolded Leys for being so old-fashioned about social media, suggesting, "just live your life without being so bothered about offending other people" or saying that "the entire world doesn't have to be sanitized to meet individual people's preferences." Others seemed to better understand Leys' point of view, with one agreeing that "the problem is that our modern norms (and tech) lead to everyone sharing everything with a large social network." Surveying the lively thread, another social media hater joked, "I feel vindicated for my decision to entirely stay off of this drama machine." Leys told Ars that he would "absolutely" be in favor of personal social networks like Meta's platforms dying off or losing steam, as Zuckerberg suggested they already are. He thinks that the decline in personal post engagement that Meta is seeing is likely due to a combination of factors, where some users may prefer more privacy now after years of broadcasting their lives, and others may be tired of the pressure of building a personal brand or experiencing other "odd social dynamics." Setting user sentiments aside, Meta is also responsible for people engaging with fewer of their friends' posts. Meta announced that it would double the amount of force-fed filler in people's feeds on Instagram and Facebook starting in 2023. That's when the two-year span begins that Zuckerberg measured in testifying about the sudden drop-off in friends' content engagement. So while it's easy to say the market changed, Meta may be obscuring how much it shaped that shift. Degrading the newsfeed and changing Instagram's default post shape from square to rectangle seemingly significantly shifted Instagram social norms, for example, creating an environment where Gen Z users felt less comfortable posting as prolifically as millennials did when Instagram debuted, The New Yorker explained last year. Where once millennials painstakingly designed immaculate grids of individual eye-catching photos to seem cool online, Gen Z users told The New Yorker that posting a single photo now feels "humiliating" and like a "social risk." But rather than eliminate the impulse to post, this cultural shift has popularized a different form of personal posting: staggered photo dumps, where users wait to post a variety of photos together to sum up a month of events or curate a vibe, the trend piece explained. And Meta is clearly intent on fueling that momentum, doubling the maximum number of photos that users can feature in a single post to encourage even more social posting, The New Yorker noted. Brendan Benedict, an attorney for Benedict Law Group PLLC who has helped litigate big tech antitrust cases, is monitoring the FTC monopoly trial on a Substack called Big Tech on Trial. He told Ars that the evidence at the trial has shown that "consumers want more friends and family content, and Meta is belatedly trying to address this" with features like the "friends" tab, while claiming there's less interest in this content. Leys doesn't think social media—at least the way that Facebook defined it in the mid-2000s—will ever die, because people will never stop wanting social networks like Facebook or Instagram to stay connected with all their friends and family. But he could see a world where, if people ever started truly caring about privacy or "indeed [got] tired of the social dynamics and personal brand-building... the kind of social media like Facebook and Instagram will have been a generational phenomenon, and they may not immediately bounce back," especially if it's easy to switch to other platforms that respond better to user preferences. He also agreed that requiring interoperability would likely lead to better social media products, but he maintained that "it would still not get me on Instagram." Interoperability shakes up social media Meta thought it may have already beaten the FTC's monopoly case, filing for a motion for summary judgment after the FTC rested its case in a bid to end the trial early. That dream was quickly dashed when the judge denied the motion days later. But no matter the outcome of the trial, Meta's influence over the social media world may be waning just as it's facing increasing pressure to open up its platforms more than ever. The FTC has alleged that Meta weaponized platform access early on, only allowing certain companies to interoperate and denying access to anyone perceived as a threat to its alleged monopoly power. That includes limiting promotions of Instagram to keep users engaged with Facebook Blue. A primary concern for Meta (then Facebook), the FTC claimed, was avoiding "training users to check multiple feeds," which might allow other apps to "cannibalize" its users. "Facebook has used this power to deter and suppress competitive threats to its personal social networking monopoly. In order to protect its monopoly, Facebook adopted and required developers to agree to conditional dealing policies that limited third-party apps’ ability to engage with Facebook rivals or to develop into rivals themselves," the FTC alleged. By 2011, the FTC alleged, then-Facebook had begun terminating API access to any developers that made it easier to export user data into a competing social network without Facebook's permission. That practice only ended when the UK parliament started calling out Facebook’s anticompetitive conduct toward app developers in 2018, the FTC alleged. According to the FTC, Meta continues "to this day" to "screen developers and can weaponize API access in ways that cement its dominance," and if scrutiny ever subsides, Meta is expected to return to such anticompetitive practices as the AI race heats up. One potential hurdle for Meta could be that the push for interoperability is not just coming from the FTC or lawmakers who recently reintroduced bipartisan legislation to end walled gardens. Doctorow told Ars that "huge public groundswells of mistrust and anger about excessive corporate power" that "cross political lines" are prompting global antitrust probes into big tech companies and are perhaps finally forcing a reckoning after years of degrading popular products to chase higher and higher revenues. For social media companies, mounting concerns about privacy and suspicions about content manipulation or censorship are driving public distrust, Doctorow said, as well as fears of surveillance capitalism. The latter includes theories that Doctorow is skeptical of. Weinstein embraced them, though, warning that platforms seem to be profiting off data without consent while brainwashing users. Allowing users to leave the platform without losing access to their friends, their social posts, and their messages might be the best way to incentivize Meta to either genuinely compete for billions of users or lose them forever as better options pop up that can plug into their networks. In his Newsweek op-ed, Weinstein suggested that web inventor Tim Berners-Lee has already invented a working protocol "to enable people to own, upload, download, and relocate their social graphs," which maps users' connections across platforms. That could be used to mitigate "the network effect" that locks users into platforms like Meta's "while interrupting unwanted data collection." At the same time, Doctorow told Ars that increasingly popular decentralized platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon already provide interoperability and are next looking into "building interoperable gateways" between their services. Doctorow said that communicating with other users across platforms may feel "awkward" at first, but ultimately, it may be like "having to find the diesel pump at the gas station" instead of the unleaded gas pump. "You'll still be going to the same gas station," Doctorow suggested. Opening up gateways into all platforms could be useful in the future, Doctorow suggested. Imagine if one platform goes down—it would no longer disrupt communications as drastically, as users could just pivot to communicate on another platform and reach the same audience. The same goes for platforms that users grow to distrust. The EFF supports regulators' attempts to pass well-crafted interoperability mandates, Doctorow said, noting that "if you have to worry about your users leaving, you generally have to treat them better." But would interoperability fix social media? The FTC has alleged that "Facebook’s dominant position in the US personal social networking market is durable due to significant entry barriers, including direct network effects and high switching costs." Meta disputes the FTC's complaint as outdated, arguing that its platform could be substituted by pretty much any social network. However, Guy Aridor, a co-author of a recent article called "The Economics of Social Media" in the Journal of Economic Literature, told Ars that dominant platforms are probably threatened by shifting social media trends and are likely to remain "resistant to interoperability" because "it’s in the interest of the platform to make switching and coordination costs high so that users are less likely to migrate away." For Meta, research shows its platforms' network effects have appeared to weaken somewhat but "clearly still exist" despite social media users increasingly seeking content on platforms rather than just socialization, Aridor said. Interoperability advocates believe it will make it easier for startups to compete with giants like Meta, which fight hard and sometimes seemingly dirty to keep users on their apps. Reintroducing the ACCESS Act, which requires platform compatibility to enable service switching, Senator Mark R. Warner (D-Va.) said that "interoperability and portability are powerful tools to promote innovative new companies and limit anti-competitive behaviors." He's hoping that passing these "long-overdue requirements" will "boost competition and give consumers more power." Aridor told Ars it's obvious that "interoperability would clearly increase competition," but he still has questions about whether users would benefit from that competition "since one consistent theme is that these platforms are optimized to maximize engagement, and there’s numerous empirical evidence we have by now that engagement isn’t necessarily correlated with utility." Consider, Aridor suggested, how toxic content often leads to high engagement but lower user satisfaction, as MeWe experienced during its 2021 backlash. Aridor said there is currently "very little empirical evidence on the effects of interoperability," but theoretically, if it increased competition in the current climate, it would likely "push the market more toward supplying engaging entertainment-related content as opposed to friends and family type of content." Benedict told Ars that a remedy like interoperability would likely only be useful to combat Meta's alleged monopoly following a breakup, which he views as the "natural remedy" following a potential win in the FTC's lawsuit. Without the breakup and other meaningful reforms, a Meta win could preserve the status quo and see the company never open up its platforms, perhaps perpetuating Meta's influence over social media well into the future. And if Zuckerberg's vision comes to pass, instead of seeing what your friends are posting on interoperating platforms across the Internet, you may have a dozen AI friends trained on your real friends' behaviors sending you regular dopamine hits to keep you scrolling on Facebook or Instagram. Aridor's team's article suggested that, regardless of user preferences, social media remains a permanent fixture of society. If that's true, users could get stuck forever using whichever platforms connect them with the widest range of contacts. "While social media has continued to evolve, one thing that has not changed is that social media remains a central part of people’s lives," his team's article concluded. Ashley Belanger Senior Policy Reporter Ashley Belanger Senior Policy Reporter Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience. 1 Comments
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  • Meta argues enshittification isn’t real in bid to toss FTC monopoly trial

    Seeking closure

    Meta argues enshittification isn’t real in bid to toss FTC monopoly trial

    How many ads is too many? Meta denies ad load harms users in bid to end trial early.

    Ashley Belanger



    May 16, 2025 12:01 pm

    |

    13

    Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., departs federal court in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, April 16, 2025.

    Credit:

    Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg

    Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., departs federal court in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, April 16, 2025.

    Credit:

    Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg

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    Meta thinks there's no reason to carry on with its defense after the Federal Trade Commission closed its monopoly case, and the company has moved to end the trial early by claiming that the FTC utterly failed to prove its case.
    "The FTC has no proof that Meta has monopoly power," Meta's motion for judgment filed Thursday said, "and therefore the court should rule in favor of Meta."
    According to Meta, the FTC failed to show evidence that "the overall quality of Meta’s apps has declined" or that the company shows too many ads to users. Meta says that's "fatal" to the FTC's case that the company wielded monopoly power to pursue more ad revenue while degrading user experience over time. And on top of allegedly showing no evidence of "ad load, privacy, integrity, and features" degradation on Meta apps, Meta argued there's no precedent for an antitrust claim rooted in this alleged harm.
    "Meta knows of no case finding monopoly power based solely on a claimed degradation in product quality, and the FTC has cited none," Meta argued.
    Meta has maintained throughout the trial that its users actually like seeing ads. In the company's recent motion, Meta argued that the FTC provided no insights into what "the right number of ads" should be, "let alone" provide proof that "Meta showed more ads" than it would in a competitive market where users could easily switch services if ad load became overwhelming.

    Further, Meta argued that the FTC did not show evidence that users sharing friends-and-family content were shown more ads. Meta noted that it "does not profit by showing more ads to users who do not click on them," so it only shows more ads to users who click ads.
    Meta also insisted that there's "nothing but speculation" showing that Instagram or WhatsApp would have been better off or grown into rivals had Meta not acquired them.
    The company claimed that without Meta's resources, Instagram may have died off. Meta noted that Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom testified that his app was “pretty broken and duct-taped” together, making it "vulnerable to spam" before Meta bought it.
    Rather than enshittification, what Meta did to Instagram could be considered "a consumer-welfare bonanza," Meta argued, while dismissing "smoking gun" emails from Mark Zuckerberg discussing buying Instagram to bury it as "legally irrelevant."
    Dismissing these as "a few dated emails," Meta argued that "efforts to litigate Mr. Zuckerberg’s state of mind before the acquisition in 2012 are pointless."
    "What matters is what Meta did," Meta argued, which was pump Instagram with resources that allowed it "to 'thrive'—adding many new features, attracting hundreds of millions and then billions of users, and monetizing with great success."
    In the case of WhatsApp, Meta argued that nobody thinks WhatsApp had any intention to pivot to social media when the founders testified that their goal was to never add social features, preferring to offer a simple, clean messaging app. And Meta disputed any claim that it feared Google might buy WhatsApp as the basis for creating a Facebook rival, arguing that "the sole Meta witness tolearn of Google’s acquisition efforts testified that he did not have that worry."

    Meta hopes to avoid breakup
    The monopoly trial is supposed to run through June, but Meta is hoping that US District Judge James Boasberg will agree that the FTC has failed to make its case and end the trial early.
    Granting Meta's motion would remove any threat of a breakup of its family of apps while also letting Meta off the hook of raising its defense. This could spare Meta any potential further embarrassment of having its founder's unvarnished internal emails picked apart in public.
    For Boasberg, it will likely come down to the FTC's market definition alleging that Meta dominates and forecloses rivals in a personal social networking services market that Meta says is a "fiction." If Boasberg buys Meta's argument that TikTok is actually Meta's biggest rival—and not Snap or MeWe—Meta could have an easier time shutting down the case.
    The FTC has not yet commented on the motion, but the agency was determined to go through with the trial, rejecting a reportedly billion settlement offer from Meta. Holding out for billion, the FTC appeared confident in presenting its case, arguing that TikTok—which attracts users broadcasting to strangers—is not a substitute for Meta's apps, which are designed to connect friends and family. The FTC likely expects to see the trial through to the end, when the agency, in a win, will likely try to force Meta to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp.
    That's not necessarily an inevitability in a Meta loss, though. If Boasberg denies Meta's motion, Meta will have to present more evidence and deliver closing arguments before a second phase of the trial would litigate potential remedies.

    Ashley Belanger
    Senior Policy Reporter

    Ashley Belanger
    Senior Policy Reporter

    Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

    13 Comments
    #meta #argues #enshittification #isnt #real
    Meta argues enshittification isn’t real in bid to toss FTC monopoly trial
    Seeking closure Meta argues enshittification isn’t real in bid to toss FTC monopoly trial How many ads is too many? Meta denies ad load harms users in bid to end trial early. Ashley Belanger – May 16, 2025 12:01 pm | 13 Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., departs federal court in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, April 16, 2025. Credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., departs federal court in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, April 16, 2025. Credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more Meta thinks there's no reason to carry on with its defense after the Federal Trade Commission closed its monopoly case, and the company has moved to end the trial early by claiming that the FTC utterly failed to prove its case. "The FTC has no proof that Meta has monopoly power," Meta's motion for judgment filed Thursday said, "and therefore the court should rule in favor of Meta." According to Meta, the FTC failed to show evidence that "the overall quality of Meta’s apps has declined" or that the company shows too many ads to users. Meta says that's "fatal" to the FTC's case that the company wielded monopoly power to pursue more ad revenue while degrading user experience over time. And on top of allegedly showing no evidence of "ad load, privacy, integrity, and features" degradation on Meta apps, Meta argued there's no precedent for an antitrust claim rooted in this alleged harm. "Meta knows of no case finding monopoly power based solely on a claimed degradation in product quality, and the FTC has cited none," Meta argued. Meta has maintained throughout the trial that its users actually like seeing ads. In the company's recent motion, Meta argued that the FTC provided no insights into what "the right number of ads" should be, "let alone" provide proof that "Meta showed more ads" than it would in a competitive market where users could easily switch services if ad load became overwhelming. Further, Meta argued that the FTC did not show evidence that users sharing friends-and-family content were shown more ads. Meta noted that it "does not profit by showing more ads to users who do not click on them," so it only shows more ads to users who click ads. Meta also insisted that there's "nothing but speculation" showing that Instagram or WhatsApp would have been better off or grown into rivals had Meta not acquired them. The company claimed that without Meta's resources, Instagram may have died off. Meta noted that Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom testified that his app was “pretty broken and duct-taped” together, making it "vulnerable to spam" before Meta bought it. Rather than enshittification, what Meta did to Instagram could be considered "a consumer-welfare bonanza," Meta argued, while dismissing "smoking gun" emails from Mark Zuckerberg discussing buying Instagram to bury it as "legally irrelevant." Dismissing these as "a few dated emails," Meta argued that "efforts to litigate Mr. Zuckerberg’s state of mind before the acquisition in 2012 are pointless." "What matters is what Meta did," Meta argued, which was pump Instagram with resources that allowed it "to 'thrive'—adding many new features, attracting hundreds of millions and then billions of users, and monetizing with great success." In the case of WhatsApp, Meta argued that nobody thinks WhatsApp had any intention to pivot to social media when the founders testified that their goal was to never add social features, preferring to offer a simple, clean messaging app. And Meta disputed any claim that it feared Google might buy WhatsApp as the basis for creating a Facebook rival, arguing that "the sole Meta witness tolearn of Google’s acquisition efforts testified that he did not have that worry." Meta hopes to avoid breakup The monopoly trial is supposed to run through June, but Meta is hoping that US District Judge James Boasberg will agree that the FTC has failed to make its case and end the trial early. Granting Meta's motion would remove any threat of a breakup of its family of apps while also letting Meta off the hook of raising its defense. This could spare Meta any potential further embarrassment of having its founder's unvarnished internal emails picked apart in public. For Boasberg, it will likely come down to the FTC's market definition alleging that Meta dominates and forecloses rivals in a personal social networking services market that Meta says is a "fiction." If Boasberg buys Meta's argument that TikTok is actually Meta's biggest rival—and not Snap or MeWe—Meta could have an easier time shutting down the case. The FTC has not yet commented on the motion, but the agency was determined to go through with the trial, rejecting a reportedly billion settlement offer from Meta. Holding out for billion, the FTC appeared confident in presenting its case, arguing that TikTok—which attracts users broadcasting to strangers—is not a substitute for Meta's apps, which are designed to connect friends and family. The FTC likely expects to see the trial through to the end, when the agency, in a win, will likely try to force Meta to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp. That's not necessarily an inevitability in a Meta loss, though. If Boasberg denies Meta's motion, Meta will have to present more evidence and deliver closing arguments before a second phase of the trial would litigate potential remedies. Ashley Belanger Senior Policy Reporter Ashley Belanger Senior Policy Reporter Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience. 13 Comments #meta #argues #enshittification #isnt #real
    ARSTECHNICA.COM
    Meta argues enshittification isn’t real in bid to toss FTC monopoly trial
    Seeking closure Meta argues enshittification isn’t real in bid to toss FTC monopoly trial How many ads is too many? Meta denies ad load harms users in bid to end trial early. Ashley Belanger – May 16, 2025 12:01 pm | 13 Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., departs federal court in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, April 16, 2025. Credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., departs federal court in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, April 16, 2025. Credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only   Learn more Meta thinks there's no reason to carry on with its defense after the Federal Trade Commission closed its monopoly case, and the company has moved to end the trial early by claiming that the FTC utterly failed to prove its case. "The FTC has no proof that Meta has monopoly power," Meta's motion for judgment filed Thursday said, "and therefore the court should rule in favor of Meta." According to Meta, the FTC failed to show evidence that "the overall quality of Meta’s apps has declined" or that the company shows too many ads to users. Meta says that's "fatal" to the FTC's case that the company wielded monopoly power to pursue more ad revenue while degrading user experience over time (an Internet trend known as "enshittification"). And on top of allegedly showing no evidence of "ad load, privacy, integrity, and features" degradation on Meta apps, Meta argued there's no precedent for an antitrust claim rooted in this alleged harm. "Meta knows of no case finding monopoly power based solely on a claimed degradation in product quality, and the FTC has cited none," Meta argued. Meta has maintained throughout the trial that its users actually like seeing ads. In the company's recent motion, Meta argued that the FTC provided no insights into what "the right number of ads" should be, "let alone" provide proof that "Meta showed more ads" than it would in a competitive market where users could easily switch services if ad load became overwhelming. Further, Meta argued that the FTC did not show evidence that users sharing friends-and-family content were shown more ads. Meta noted that it "does not profit by showing more ads to users who do not click on them," so it only shows more ads to users who click ads. Meta also insisted that there's "nothing but speculation" showing that Instagram or WhatsApp would have been better off or grown into rivals had Meta not acquired them. The company claimed that without Meta's resources, Instagram may have died off. Meta noted that Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom testified that his app was “pretty broken and duct-taped” together, making it "vulnerable to spam" before Meta bought it. Rather than enshittification, what Meta did to Instagram could be considered "a consumer-welfare bonanza," Meta argued, while dismissing "smoking gun" emails from Mark Zuckerberg discussing buying Instagram to bury it as "legally irrelevant." Dismissing these as "a few dated emails," Meta argued that "efforts to litigate Mr. Zuckerberg’s state of mind before the acquisition in 2012 are pointless." "What matters is what Meta did," Meta argued, which was pump Instagram with resources that allowed it "to 'thrive'—adding many new features, attracting hundreds of millions and then billions of users, and monetizing with great success." In the case of WhatsApp, Meta argued that nobody thinks WhatsApp had any intention to pivot to social media when the founders testified that their goal was to never add social features, preferring to offer a simple, clean messaging app. And Meta disputed any claim that it feared Google might buy WhatsApp as the basis for creating a Facebook rival, arguing that "the sole Meta witness to (supposedly) learn of Google’s acquisition efforts testified that he did not have that worry." Meta hopes to avoid breakup The monopoly trial is supposed to run through June, but Meta is hoping that US District Judge James Boasberg will agree that the FTC has failed to make its case and end the trial early. Granting Meta's motion would remove any threat of a breakup of its family of apps while also letting Meta off the hook of raising its defense. This could spare Meta any potential further embarrassment of having its founder's unvarnished internal emails picked apart in public. For Boasberg, it will likely come down to the FTC's market definition alleging that Meta dominates and forecloses rivals in a personal social networking services market that Meta says is a "fiction." If Boasberg buys Meta's argument that TikTok is actually Meta's biggest rival—and not Snap or MeWe—Meta could have an easier time shutting down the case. The FTC has not yet commented on the motion, but the agency was determined to go through with the trial, rejecting a reportedly $1 billion settlement offer from Meta. Holding out for $30 billion, the FTC appeared confident in presenting its case, arguing that TikTok—which attracts users broadcasting to strangers—is not a substitute for Meta's apps, which are designed to connect friends and family. The FTC likely expects to see the trial through to the end, when the agency, in a win, will likely try to force Meta to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp. That's not necessarily an inevitability in a Meta loss, though. If Boasberg denies Meta's motion, Meta will have to present more evidence and deliver closing arguments before a second phase of the trial would litigate potential remedies. Ashley Belanger Senior Policy Reporter Ashley Belanger Senior Policy Reporter Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience. 13 Comments
    0 Yorumlar 0 hisse senetleri
  • Bloomberg: PlayStation Executive Jade Raymond Leaves Haven Studios (Game drops the $, now 'Fairgames' instead)

    vicegold
    Member

    Oct 27, 2017

    464

    PlayStation Executive Jade Raymond Leaves Studio She Founded on Bloomberg.com

    PlayStation leadership didn't give Haven staff a reason for her departure, but it came several weeks after an external test of Haven's first game, the online shooter Fairgames, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Some developers at Haven were concerned about how the game was received and its progress, said the people, who asked not to be identified because they aren't authorized to speak publicly.

    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    Marie-Eve Danis and Pierre-François Sapinski are now co-heading the studio 

    Last edited: Yesterday at 5:27 PM

    Max|Payne
    Member

    Oct 27, 2017

    9,836

    Portugal

    Oh christ, I almost read something else.

    My heart jumped a bit.

    Edit: OP changed the title. The original could almost be misread for something far more tragic. 

    CloseTalker
    Sister in the Craft
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    38,101

    Does not inspire confidence in the one game they have announced
     

    NinjaScooter
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    60,644

    article is paywalled.
     

    Mesoian
    ▲ Legend ▲
    Member

    Oct 28, 2017

    31,672

    OH FUCK, I didn't realize she was doing FairGameWelp... 

    SirKai
    Member

    Dec 28, 2017

    10,146

    Washington

    Now, will Fair Game Dollar Sign actually release?
     

    Yeeboh
    Member

    Jul 3, 2024

    1,756

    Not again
     

    Ant_17
    Member

    Oct 28, 2017

    2,903

    Greece

    Fair games, unfair jobs
     

    Uncle at Nintendo
    2nd Generation Uncle at Nintendo
    Member

    Jan 3, 2018

    9,819

    Her company, Haven Studios, is developing an online shooter title called Fairgames

    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    Ruh ruh Raggy 

    Zaheer
    Member

    Oct 27, 2017

    2,392

    raspberrymousse
    Member

    Mar 19, 2021

    5,299

    Sony really miscalculated hard with its live-service push
     

    wagon
    Member

    Jan 6, 2025

    413

    Now I'm extra curious what the game is gonna look like lol
     

    Mocha Joe
    Member

    Jun 2, 2021

    13,385

    Holy fuck
     

    Shard Shinjuku
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    31,560

    Tampa

    Jade just can not catch a break.
     

    PlanetSmasher
    The Abominable Showman
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    132,614

    Considering we've seen literally nothing of the game since it was originally revealed, I can't really bring myself to have much of a reaction to this.

    Gotta wonder if Jade's just gonna pop up with another new startup studio, join an existing studio or just peace out of the industry entirely at this rate. The chances seem roughly equal for all three options. 

    Pai Pai Master
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    37,139

    Atlanta GA

    Well then.
     

    GDGF
    Member

    Oct 26, 2017

    9,130

    It's happening again.
     

    krazen
    Member

    Oct 27, 2017

    15,550

    Gentrified Brooklyn

    The GaaS goldrush is feeling more like a mudslide.
     

    Strike
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    30,510

    Uh-oh.
     

    Genesius
    Member

    Nov 2, 2018

    20,500

    They're about to announce it's canned and she's getting out now.
     

    th1nk
    Member

    Nov 6, 2017

    9,445

    I am shocked… well not that shocked
     

    Dust
    C H A O S
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    40,938

    FairGame$ is gonna get shitcanned, I can feel it.
     

    OhhEldenRing
    Member

    Aug 14, 2024

    2,774

    Suspect there's something wrong with the direction of Fairgame$ and although I have nothing to base this on why else would she leave
     

    Nameless Hero
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    23,332

    Jason, you keep misspelling Fairgame$ as Fairgames for some reason
     

    CupOfDoom
    Member

    Dec 17, 2017

    5,150

    it came several weeks after an external test of Haven's first game

    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    that seems auspicious.
     

    Wallace
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    27,949

    Midwest

    Concord V3
     

    Lashley
    <<Tag Here>>
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    65,317

    Jesus wept
     

    poklane
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    32,002

    the Netherlands

    Yeah, nobody should be surprised if Fairgames gets canceled and Haven gets shut down. Reveal trailer was only good for putting people to sleep, and the 2 years of silence since then is telling.
     

    DrScruffleton
    Member

    Oct 26, 2017

    14,833

    I'll be shocked if fairgame comes out some day
     

    Lukar
    Unshakable Resolve - Prophet of Truth
    Member

    Oct 27, 2017

    28,123

    The year is 2014. Jade Raymond has left her studio.

    The year is 2018. Jade Raymond has left her studio.

    The year is 2021. Jade Raymond has left her studio.

    The year is 2025. Jade Raymond has left her studio. 

    dex3108
    Member

    Oct 26, 2017

    24,707

    She really can't release game anymore. She didn't released game basically since she left Ubisoft.
     

    Mivey
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    20,602

    Someone clearly put a gaming vodoo curse on that poor woman. Any project she touches just withers and dies.
     

    SirKai
    Member

    Dec 28, 2017

    10,146

    Washington

    Isn't this the like, third or so new studio / project she was involved with in the past decade that didn't launch? Though this might still end up releasing I guess.
     

    maze001
    Member

    Sep 18, 2024

    596

    Oh man

    It's been like a slow motion car crash ever since Concord 

    Fisty
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    22,537

    Well there goes any hope i had for Fair Game$
     

    Lepi
    Member

    Mar 24, 2020

    886

    Another disastrously managed project from the looks of it.
     

    Xando
    Member

    Oct 28, 2017

    37,394

    but it came several weeks after an external test of Haven's first game, the online shooter Fairgames, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Some developers at Haven were concerned about how the game was received and its progress

    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    Uh oh
     

    dom
    ▲ Legend ▲
    Avenger

    Oct 25, 2017

    12,366

    The falloff of Jade Raymond is crazy
     

    egg
    The Fallen

    Oct 26, 2017

    7,642

    maze001 said:

    Oh man

    It's been like a slow motion car crash ever since Concord
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    How so? Lol. 

    Threadmarks No more $ for Fairgames
    New

    Index

    jschreier
    Press Sneak Fuck
    Verified

    Oct 25, 2017

    1,272

    Nameless Hero said:

    Jason, you keep misspelling Fairgame$ as Fairgames for some reason

    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    I guess I buried the real scoop here, but they dropped the Also, here is a gift link so people can actually read this:  

    New

    Index

    GTAce
    Member

    Oct 27, 2017

    4,579

    Bonn, Germany

    Fairgame$ and Marathon will complete the Concord trilogy.
     

    Tsunami561
    Member

    Mar 7, 2023

    5,327

    Okay who's next in line to give her 300m dollars
     

    Stibbs
    Member

    Feb 8, 2023

    4,229

    The 518

    holy shit the L's for Sony's GAAS games keep coming, I genuinely think Fairgames might get Hyenas'd
     

    pswii60
    Member

    Oct 27, 2017

    28,776

    The Milky Way

    I hope the rest of the team can survive this. They already had to go through the Google Stadia shit.

    Lukar said:

    The year is 2014. Jade Raymond has left her studio.

    The year is 2018. Jade Raymond has left her studio.

    The year is 2021. Jade Raymond has left her studio.

    The year is 2025. Jade Raymond has left her studio.Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    You are though aren't you
     

    EVA UNIT 01
    Member

    Oct 27, 2017

    7,198

    CA

    Its not releasing
     

    wagon
    Member

    Jan 6, 2025

    413

    jschreier said:

    I guess I buried the real scoop here, but they dropped the Also, here is a gift link so people can actually read this:
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    NOOOOOOOOO THE ONLY THING ABOUT THE GAME THAT ACTUALLY STOOD OUT TO ME ON FIRST IMPRESSIONS
     

    DrScruffleton
    Member

    Oct 26, 2017

    14,833

    jschreier said:

    I guess I buried the real scoop here, but they dropped the Also, here is a gift link so people can actually read this:
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    Not playing it without the dollar sign
     

    Jawmuncher
    Crisis Dino
    Moderator

    Oct 25, 2017

    44,760

    Ibis Island

    Jade showing up and leaving is just too iconic at this point.
     

    Lukar
    Unshakable Resolve - Prophet of Truth
    Member

    Oct 27, 2017

    28,123

    pswii60 said:

    I hope the rest of the team can survive this. They already had to go through the Google shit.

    You are though aren't you
    Click to expand...
    Click to shrink...

    No, not really. I love the games she's been involved with in the past and wish she could catch a break.
     

    KZXcellent
    One Winged Slayer
    Member

    Oct 25, 2017

    4,172

    The game already wasn't inspiring confidence between it being a Sony Service Game and also being the GenAI game.
     
    #bloomberg #playstation #executive #jade #raymond
    Bloomberg: PlayStation Executive Jade Raymond Leaves Haven Studios (Game drops the $, now 'Fairgames' instead)
    vicegold Member Oct 27, 2017 464 PlayStation Executive Jade Raymond Leaves Studio She Founded on Bloomberg.com PlayStation leadership didn't give Haven staff a reason for her departure, but it came several weeks after an external test of Haven's first game, the online shooter Fairgames, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Some developers at Haven were concerned about how the game was received and its progress, said the people, who asked not to be identified because they aren't authorized to speak publicly. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Marie-Eve Danis and Pierre-François Sapinski are now co-heading the studio  Last edited: Yesterday at 5:27 PM Max|Payne Member Oct 27, 2017 9,836 Portugal Oh christ, I almost read something else. My heart jumped a bit. Edit: OP changed the title. The original could almost be misread for something far more tragic.  CloseTalker Sister in the Craft Member Oct 25, 2017 38,101 Does not inspire confidence in the one game they have announced   NinjaScooter Member Oct 25, 2017 60,644 article is paywalled.   Mesoian ▲ Legend ▲ Member Oct 28, 2017 31,672 OH FUCK, I didn't realize she was doing FairGameWelp...  SirKai Member Dec 28, 2017 10,146 Washington Now, will Fair Game Dollar Sign actually release?   Yeeboh Member Jul 3, 2024 1,756 Not again   Ant_17 Member Oct 28, 2017 2,903 Greece Fair games, unfair jobs   Uncle at Nintendo 2nd Generation Uncle at Nintendo Member Jan 3, 2018 9,819 Her company, Haven Studios, is developing an online shooter title called Fairgames Click to expand... Click to shrink... Ruh ruh Raggy  Zaheer Member Oct 27, 2017 2,392 raspberrymousse Member Mar 19, 2021 5,299 Sony really miscalculated hard with its live-service push   wagon Member Jan 6, 2025 413 Now I'm extra curious what the game is gonna look like lol   Mocha Joe Member Jun 2, 2021 13,385 Holy fuck   Shard Shinjuku Member Oct 25, 2017 31,560 Tampa Jade just can not catch a break.   PlanetSmasher The Abominable Showman Member Oct 25, 2017 132,614 Considering we've seen literally nothing of the game since it was originally revealed, I can't really bring myself to have much of a reaction to this. Gotta wonder if Jade's just gonna pop up with another new startup studio, join an existing studio or just peace out of the industry entirely at this rate. The chances seem roughly equal for all three options.  Pai Pai Master Member Oct 25, 2017 37,139 Atlanta GA Well then.   GDGF Member Oct 26, 2017 9,130 It's happening again.   krazen Member Oct 27, 2017 15,550 Gentrified Brooklyn The GaaS goldrush is feeling more like a mudslide.   Strike Member Oct 25, 2017 30,510 Uh-oh.   Genesius Member Nov 2, 2018 20,500 They're about to announce it's canned and she's getting out now.   th1nk Member Nov 6, 2017 9,445 I am shocked… well not that shocked   Dust C H A O S Member Oct 25, 2017 40,938 FairGame$ is gonna get shitcanned, I can feel it.   OhhEldenRing Member Aug 14, 2024 2,774 Suspect there's something wrong with the direction of Fairgame$ and although I have nothing to base this on why else would she leave   Nameless Hero Member Oct 25, 2017 23,332 Jason, you keep misspelling Fairgame$ as Fairgames for some reason   CupOfDoom Member Dec 17, 2017 5,150 it came several weeks after an external test of Haven's first game Click to expand... Click to shrink... that seems auspicious.   Wallace Member Oct 25, 2017 27,949 Midwest Concord V3   Lashley <<Tag Here>> Member Oct 25, 2017 65,317 Jesus wept   poklane Member Oct 25, 2017 32,002 the Netherlands Yeah, nobody should be surprised if Fairgames gets canceled and Haven gets shut down. Reveal trailer was only good for putting people to sleep, and the 2 years of silence since then is telling.   DrScruffleton Member Oct 26, 2017 14,833 I'll be shocked if fairgame comes out some day   Lukar Unshakable Resolve - Prophet of Truth Member Oct 27, 2017 28,123 The year is 2014. Jade Raymond has left her studio. The year is 2018. Jade Raymond has left her studio. The year is 2021. Jade Raymond has left her studio. The year is 2025. Jade Raymond has left her studio.  dex3108 Member Oct 26, 2017 24,707 She really can't release game anymore. She didn't released game basically since she left Ubisoft.   Mivey Member Oct 25, 2017 20,602 Someone clearly put a gaming vodoo curse on that poor woman. Any project she touches just withers and dies.   SirKai Member Dec 28, 2017 10,146 Washington Isn't this the like, third or so new studio / project she was involved with in the past decade that didn't launch? Though this might still end up releasing I guess.   maze001 Member Sep 18, 2024 596 Oh man It's been like a slow motion car crash ever since Concord  Fisty Member Oct 25, 2017 22,537 Well there goes any hope i had for Fair Game$   Lepi Member Mar 24, 2020 886 Another disastrously managed project from the looks of it.   Xando Member Oct 28, 2017 37,394 but it came several weeks after an external test of Haven's first game, the online shooter Fairgames, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Some developers at Haven were concerned about how the game was received and its progress Click to expand... Click to shrink... Uh oh   dom ▲ Legend ▲ Avenger Oct 25, 2017 12,366 The falloff of Jade Raymond is crazy   egg The Fallen Oct 26, 2017 7,642 maze001 said: Oh man It's been like a slow motion car crash ever since Concord Click to expand... Click to shrink... How so? Lol.  Threadmarks No more $ for Fairgames New Index jschreier Press Sneak Fuck Verified Oct 25, 2017 1,272 Nameless Hero said: Jason, you keep misspelling Fairgame$ as Fairgames for some reason Click to expand... Click to shrink... I guess I buried the real scoop here, but they dropped the Also, here is a gift link so people can actually read this:   New Index GTAce Member Oct 27, 2017 4,579 Bonn, Germany Fairgame$ and Marathon will complete the Concord trilogy.   Tsunami561 Member Mar 7, 2023 5,327 Okay who's next in line to give her 300m dollars   Stibbs Member Feb 8, 2023 4,229 The 518 holy shit the L's for Sony's GAAS games keep coming, I genuinely think Fairgames might get Hyenas'd   pswii60 Member Oct 27, 2017 28,776 The Milky Way I hope the rest of the team can survive this. They already had to go through the Google Stadia shit. Lukar said: The year is 2014. Jade Raymond has left her studio. The year is 2018. Jade Raymond has left her studio. The year is 2021. Jade Raymond has left her studio. The year is 2025. Jade Raymond has left her studio.Click to expand... Click to shrink... You are though aren't you   EVA UNIT 01 Member Oct 27, 2017 7,198 CA Its not releasing   wagon Member Jan 6, 2025 413 jschreier said: I guess I buried the real scoop here, but they dropped the Also, here is a gift link so people can actually read this: Click to expand... Click to shrink... NOOOOOOOOO THE ONLY THING ABOUT THE GAME THAT ACTUALLY STOOD OUT TO ME ON FIRST IMPRESSIONS   DrScruffleton Member Oct 26, 2017 14,833 jschreier said: I guess I buried the real scoop here, but they dropped the Also, here is a gift link so people can actually read this: Click to expand... Click to shrink... Not playing it without the dollar sign   Jawmuncher Crisis Dino Moderator Oct 25, 2017 44,760 Ibis Island Jade showing up and leaving is just too iconic at this point.   Lukar Unshakable Resolve - Prophet of Truth Member Oct 27, 2017 28,123 pswii60 said: I hope the rest of the team can survive this. They already had to go through the Google shit. You are though aren't you Click to expand... Click to shrink... No, not really. I love the games she's been involved with in the past and wish she could catch a break.   KZXcellent One Winged Slayer Member Oct 25, 2017 4,172 The game already wasn't inspiring confidence between it being a Sony Service Game and also being the GenAI game.   #bloomberg #playstation #executive #jade #raymond
    WWW.RESETERA.COM
    Bloomberg: PlayStation Executive Jade Raymond Leaves Haven Studios (Game drops the $, now 'Fairgames' instead)
    vicegold Member Oct 27, 2017 464 PlayStation Executive Jade Raymond Leaves Studio She Founded on Bloomberg.com PlayStation leadership didn't give Haven staff a reason for her departure, but it came several weeks after an external test of Haven's first game, the online shooter Fairgames, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Some developers at Haven were concerned about how the game was received and its progress, said the people, who asked not to be identified because they aren't authorized to speak publicly. Click to expand... Click to shrink... Marie-Eve Danis and Pierre-François Sapinski are now co-heading the studio  Last edited: Yesterday at 5:27 PM Max|Payne Member Oct 27, 2017 9,836 Portugal Oh christ, I almost read something else. My heart jumped a bit. Edit: OP changed the title. The original could almost be misread for something far more tragic.  CloseTalker Sister in the Craft Member Oct 25, 2017 38,101 Does not inspire confidence in the one game they have announced   NinjaScooter Member Oct 25, 2017 60,644 article is paywalled.   Mesoian ▲ Legend ▲ Member Oct 28, 2017 31,672 OH FUCK, I didn't realize she was doing FairGame$. Welp...  SirKai Member Dec 28, 2017 10,146 Washington Now, will Fair Game Dollar Sign actually release?   Yeeboh Member Jul 3, 2024 1,756 Not again   Ant_17 Member Oct 28, 2017 2,903 Greece Fair games, unfair jobs   Uncle at Nintendo 2nd Generation Uncle at Nintendo Member Jan 3, 2018 9,819 Her company, Haven Studios, is developing an online shooter title called Fairgames Click to expand... Click to shrink... Ruh ruh Raggy  Zaheer Member Oct 27, 2017 2,392 raspberrymousse Member Mar 19, 2021 5,299 Sony really miscalculated hard with its live-service push   wagon Member Jan 6, 2025 413 Now I'm extra curious what the game is gonna look like lol   Mocha Joe Member Jun 2, 2021 13,385 Holy fuck   Shard Shinjuku Member Oct 25, 2017 31,560 Tampa Jade just can not catch a break.   PlanetSmasher The Abominable Showman Member Oct 25, 2017 132,614 Considering we've seen literally nothing of the game since it was originally revealed, I can't really bring myself to have much of a reaction to this. Gotta wonder if Jade's just gonna pop up with another new startup studio, join an existing studio or just peace out of the industry entirely at this rate. The chances seem roughly equal for all three options.  Pai Pai Master Member Oct 25, 2017 37,139 Atlanta GA Well then.   GDGF Member Oct 26, 2017 9,130 It's happening again.   krazen Member Oct 27, 2017 15,550 Gentrified Brooklyn The GaaS goldrush is feeling more like a mudslide.   Strike Member Oct 25, 2017 30,510 Uh-oh.   Genesius Member Nov 2, 2018 20,500 They're about to announce it's canned and she's getting out now.   th1nk Member Nov 6, 2017 9,445 I am shocked… well not that shocked   Dust C H A O S Member Oct 25, 2017 40,938 FairGame$ is gonna get shitcanned, I can feel it.   OhhEldenRing Member Aug 14, 2024 2,774 Suspect there's something wrong with the direction of Fairgame$ and although I have nothing to base this on why else would she leave   Nameless Hero Member Oct 25, 2017 23,332 Jason, you keep misspelling Fairgame$ as Fairgames for some reason   CupOfDoom Member Dec 17, 2017 5,150 it came several weeks after an external test of Haven's first game Click to expand... Click to shrink... that seems auspicious.   Wallace Member Oct 25, 2017 27,949 Midwest Concord V3   Lashley <<Tag Here>> Member Oct 25, 2017 65,317 Jesus wept   poklane Member Oct 25, 2017 32,002 the Netherlands Yeah, nobody should be surprised if Fairgames gets canceled and Haven gets shut down. Reveal trailer was only good for putting people to sleep, and the 2 years of silence since then is telling.   DrScruffleton Member Oct 26, 2017 14,833 I'll be shocked if fairgame comes out some day   Lukar Unshakable Resolve - Prophet of Truth Member Oct 27, 2017 28,123 The year is 2014. Jade Raymond has left her studio. The year is 2018. Jade Raymond has left her studio. The year is 2021. Jade Raymond has left her studio. The year is 2025. Jade Raymond has left her studio. (yes I know these circumstances were all different, no I am not trying to suggest anything with this post)  dex3108 Member Oct 26, 2017 24,707 She really can't release game anymore. She didn't released game basically since she left Ubisoft.   Mivey Member Oct 25, 2017 20,602 Someone clearly put a gaming vodoo curse on that poor woman. Any project she touches just withers and dies.   SirKai Member Dec 28, 2017 10,146 Washington Isn't this the like, third or so new studio / project she was involved with in the past decade that didn't launch? Though this might still end up releasing I guess.   maze001 Member Sep 18, 2024 596 Oh man It's been like a slow motion car crash ever since Concord  Fisty Member Oct 25, 2017 22,537 Well there goes any hope i had for Fair Game$   Lepi Member Mar 24, 2020 886 Another disastrously managed project from the looks of it.   Xando Member Oct 28, 2017 37,394 but it came several weeks after an external test of Haven's first game, the online shooter Fairgames, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Some developers at Haven were concerned about how the game was received and its progress Click to expand... Click to shrink... Uh oh   dom ▲ Legend ▲ Avenger Oct 25, 2017 12,366 The falloff of Jade Raymond is crazy   egg The Fallen Oct 26, 2017 7,642 maze001 said: Oh man It's been like a slow motion car crash ever since Concord Click to expand... Click to shrink... How so? Lol.  Threadmarks No more $ for Fairgames New Index jschreier Press Sneak Fuck Verified Oct 25, 2017 1,272 Nameless Hero said: Jason, you keep misspelling Fairgame$ as Fairgames for some reason Click to expand... Click to shrink... I guess I buried the real scoop here, but they dropped the $. Also, here is a gift link so people can actually read this: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...9.qOIF32mVNJUCz17mJYYZM-YWpEEYhCcjFt6lm8BeeFo  New Index GTAce Member Oct 27, 2017 4,579 Bonn, Germany Fairgame$ and Marathon will complete the Concord trilogy.   Tsunami561 Member Mar 7, 2023 5,327 Okay who's next in line to give her 300m dollars   Stibbs Member Feb 8, 2023 4,229 The 518 holy shit the L's for Sony's GAAS games keep coming, I genuinely think Fairgames might get Hyenas'd   pswii60 Member Oct 27, 2017 28,776 The Milky Way I hope the rest of the team can survive this. They already had to go through the Google Stadia shit. Lukar said: The year is 2014. Jade Raymond has left her studio. The year is 2018. Jade Raymond has left her studio. The year is 2021. Jade Raymond has left her studio. The year is 2025. Jade Raymond has left her studio. (yes I know these circumstances were all different, no I am not trying to suggest anything with this post) Click to expand... Click to shrink... You are though aren't you   EVA UNIT 01 Member Oct 27, 2017 7,198 CA Its not releasing   wagon Member Jan 6, 2025 413 jschreier said: I guess I buried the real scoop here, but they dropped the $. Also, here is a gift link so people can actually read this: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...9.qOIF32mVNJUCz17mJYYZM-YWpEEYhCcjFt6lm8BeeFo Click to expand... Click to shrink... NOOOOOOOOO THE ONLY THING ABOUT THE GAME THAT ACTUALLY STOOD OUT TO ME ON FIRST IMPRESSIONS   DrScruffleton Member Oct 26, 2017 14,833 jschreier said: I guess I buried the real scoop here, but they dropped the $. Also, here is a gift link so people can actually read this: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...9.qOIF32mVNJUCz17mJYYZM-YWpEEYhCcjFt6lm8BeeFo Click to expand... Click to shrink... Not playing it without the dollar sign   Jawmuncher Crisis Dino Moderator Oct 25, 2017 44,760 Ibis Island Jade showing up and leaving is just too iconic at this point.   Lukar Unshakable Resolve - Prophet of Truth Member Oct 27, 2017 28,123 pswii60 said: I hope the rest of the team can survive this. They already had to go through the Google shit. You are though aren't you Click to expand... Click to shrink... No, not really. I love the games she's been involved with in the past and wish she could catch a break.   KZXcellent One Winged Slayer Member Oct 25, 2017 4,172 The game already wasn't inspiring confidence between it being a Sony Service Game and also being the GenAI game.  
    0 Yorumlar 0 hisse senetleri
  • How Apple wins for enterprise IT

    It hasn’t been that long since Apple had no status at all in enterprise IT. Its products were used in some creative departments and at home, but that’s as far as things went. The iPod and iPhone changed all that, even while general exposure to powerful mobile tech transformed perceptions around what to expect from the tools you use at work.

    The Apple user experience is the company’s biggest not-so-secret weapon, and it is interesting that even decades since the first PCs appeared, Apple still delivers intuitive user experiences  people enjoy using.

    Consumer simple, enterprise ready

    Those user experiences have generated expectations, and as my old chum Dean Hager, former Jamf CEO liked to describe it, people entering the workplace wanted the systems they used there to be as easy and intuitive to understand as the Apple products they used elsewhere. Apple’s user experience eventually became something incoming enterprise employees expected — many would simply quit their job if they were using crummier tech at work than they were at home.

    At the end of the day, Apple won the enterprise one consumer user at a time.

    But the other piece to Apple’s success is that organizations that have deployed Apple products at scale have experienced significant improvements on their bottom line. Multiple reports tell us employees are happier using Apple products, they’re more productive using Apple products, and spend less on tech support on Apple products than on PCs. Staff retention rates improve even as productivity grows — and the reduced tech support costs make life easier for IT and dramatically reduce the Total Cost of Ownership of an Apple fleet. 

    How Apple wins for enterprise IT

    None of this came easy. Apple had to take its basic productand its OS X operating system and figure out how to best apply that tech to mobile devices. That’s what we began to get with the iPod and saw in living Technicolor with the iPhone; Apple took the power of computing and placed it inside the device you always have with you – your phone.

    Of course, the ability to run more complex applications on your iPhone made it possible for employees to get more work done using the device, which spawned the Bring Your Own Device wave that really began to express itself around 2010.

    Not only did employees want to be able to use the same platform at work as at home, but they also wanted to use the same mobile devices at work as at home. The biggest evidence of that was the abject failure of Windows Mobile as it showed people didn’t want to use the same PC they used at work in their mobile existences; they remained hooked on experience Apple’s ease-of-use. 

    They did then. 

    They do now.

    The evidence is everywhere

    You can see this is the direction of travel each time you read yet another report explaining Apple’s growing enterprise sales across all of its products, or the fast-proliferating number of Very Large Indeed Apple deployments at giant global companies. Not to mention that once employee choice schemes are put in place, the majority of employees seem to prefer Apple to any other platform. While it’s still early days on spatial computing, we can already see Vision Pro devices staking spaces across key industries as Apple takes what was once more or less the Mac experience and makes it both ambient and hyper-mobile.

    Spatial computing isn’t just about computing that surrounds you, it’s about computing that takes you there.

    Along this journey, Apple has thought deeply about what it offers and attempted to take down barriers to enterprise deployment. That’s why the company provides APIs for Mobile Device Management; that’s why it has high-grade security features I’m certain the company’s own CEO also uses, such as Lockdown Mode; that’s also why it remains so deeply committed to delivering regular software and hardware updates, so no enterprise professionals find themselves left insecure or abandoned on their workplace tech journey. 

    Want to do more? You can, thanks to the company’s’ rich set of developer tools, which provide a robust environment for enterprise development and integration. 

    Support and updates

    The fact that Apple’s hardware is reliable is also good for enterprise sales. Coupled with annual software updates that bring sometimes-exciting new features, user engagement remains high throughout the usable life of these devices, which now usually extends to an easy five years. Once that time is up, the resilience and reliability of the devices means they still fetch good value in the second-user markets; most major purchasers might also draw reassurance that the recycling and salvaging of the products will have some impact on their own carbon targets. 

    Enterprises also like reliability for another reason, it helps them plan ahead. 

    Not only do they know that it is unlikely Apple will make too many major changes, but they also know that unlike Windows 11, you will not wake one morning to find your PC has been updated to a new operating system without consent. These little communications do count, particularly if you are running several hundred systems in your fleet. You also cannot ignore the impact of the CrowdStrike debacle on that lovely feeling of peace and calm enterprises perhaps enjoyed before it took place.

    Apple’s platform security may not be something we can take for granted any longer, but it still exists — and while it makes sense to stay watchful, it remains unmatched. Its major software updates remain free. That’s always an easy budget line item at the end of the day. 

    What Apple gets wrong

    It is interesting, given all that it gets right, the extent to which critics like to focus on what Apple gets wrong. Some of the most common criticisms could translate into easy wins for Apple: Yes, I think it should provide more in-depth granular information to assist enterprise IT deployments, but I would also argue that its free certification courses remain the best possible way to find the answers you need to begin managing larger or newer Apple deployments. Those courses are free, well-constructed and give you a thorough grounding for this work. Though I would really like Apple to give Configurator the power to register multiple devices at once – and a little more automation would come in useful to a lot of admins, particularly in the education sector. 

    But what’s super-interesting about so many of the criticisms made around Apple in the enterprise is that they tend toward being smaller, more granular problems that the company could conceivably resolve once it stops pouring all of its R&D resources into AI development. 

    And that’s my point, really — to quietly point out that the nature of the criticisms Apple’s current enterprise solutions receive actually reflect how successfully it has penetrated the sector. It is now being asked to solve really complex questions that reflect the myriad complexities of enterprise IT requirements. It won’t solve all of them overnight, but its progress in the sector since earlier this century suggests it will probably get around to resolving many of them, one challenge at a time.

    And, rest assured, while Apple never speaks about it, I’m confident that the company does actually read criticism; it just needs to be selective concerning which challenges to solve first. And at times it must also consider whether those challenges will still be relevant a few years as tech deployment requirements change.

    Please follow me on Twitter, or join me in the AppleHolic’s bar & grill and Apple Discussions groups on MeWe.
    #how #apple #wins #enterprise
    How Apple wins for enterprise IT
    It hasn’t been that long since Apple had no status at all in enterprise IT. Its products were used in some creative departments and at home, but that’s as far as things went. The iPod and iPhone changed all that, even while general exposure to powerful mobile tech transformed perceptions around what to expect from the tools you use at work. The Apple user experience is the company’s biggest not-so-secret weapon, and it is interesting that even decades since the first PCs appeared, Apple still delivers intuitive user experiences  people enjoy using. Consumer simple, enterprise ready Those user experiences have generated expectations, and as my old chum Dean Hager, former Jamf CEO liked to describe it, people entering the workplace wanted the systems they used there to be as easy and intuitive to understand as the Apple products they used elsewhere. Apple’s user experience eventually became something incoming enterprise employees expected — many would simply quit their job if they were using crummier tech at work than they were at home. At the end of the day, Apple won the enterprise one consumer user at a time. But the other piece to Apple’s success is that organizations that have deployed Apple products at scale have experienced significant improvements on their bottom line. Multiple reports tell us employees are happier using Apple products, they’re more productive using Apple products, and spend less on tech support on Apple products than on PCs. Staff retention rates improve even as productivity grows — and the reduced tech support costs make life easier for IT and dramatically reduce the Total Cost of Ownership of an Apple fleet.  How Apple wins for enterprise IT None of this came easy. Apple had to take its basic productand its OS X operating system and figure out how to best apply that tech to mobile devices. That’s what we began to get with the iPod and saw in living Technicolor with the iPhone; Apple took the power of computing and placed it inside the device you always have with you – your phone. Of course, the ability to run more complex applications on your iPhone made it possible for employees to get more work done using the device, which spawned the Bring Your Own Device wave that really began to express itself around 2010. Not only did employees want to be able to use the same platform at work as at home, but they also wanted to use the same mobile devices at work as at home. The biggest evidence of that was the abject failure of Windows Mobile as it showed people didn’t want to use the same PC they used at work in their mobile existences; they remained hooked on experience Apple’s ease-of-use.  They did then.  They do now. The evidence is everywhere You can see this is the direction of travel each time you read yet another report explaining Apple’s growing enterprise sales across all of its products, or the fast-proliferating number of Very Large Indeed Apple deployments at giant global companies. Not to mention that once employee choice schemes are put in place, the majority of employees seem to prefer Apple to any other platform. While it’s still early days on spatial computing, we can already see Vision Pro devices staking spaces across key industries as Apple takes what was once more or less the Mac experience and makes it both ambient and hyper-mobile. Spatial computing isn’t just about computing that surrounds you, it’s about computing that takes you there. Along this journey, Apple has thought deeply about what it offers and attempted to take down barriers to enterprise deployment. That’s why the company provides APIs for Mobile Device Management; that’s why it has high-grade security features I’m certain the company’s own CEO also uses, such as Lockdown Mode; that’s also why it remains so deeply committed to delivering regular software and hardware updates, so no enterprise professionals find themselves left insecure or abandoned on their workplace tech journey.  Want to do more? You can, thanks to the company’s’ rich set of developer tools, which provide a robust environment for enterprise development and integration.  Support and updates The fact that Apple’s hardware is reliable is also good for enterprise sales. Coupled with annual software updates that bring sometimes-exciting new features, user engagement remains high throughout the usable life of these devices, which now usually extends to an easy five years. Once that time is up, the resilience and reliability of the devices means they still fetch good value in the second-user markets; most major purchasers might also draw reassurance that the recycling and salvaging of the products will have some impact on their own carbon targets.  Enterprises also like reliability for another reason, it helps them plan ahead.  Not only do they know that it is unlikely Apple will make too many major changes, but they also know that unlike Windows 11, you will not wake one morning to find your PC has been updated to a new operating system without consent. These little communications do count, particularly if you are running several hundred systems in your fleet. You also cannot ignore the impact of the CrowdStrike debacle on that lovely feeling of peace and calm enterprises perhaps enjoyed before it took place. Apple’s platform security may not be something we can take for granted any longer, but it still exists — and while it makes sense to stay watchful, it remains unmatched. Its major software updates remain free. That’s always an easy budget line item at the end of the day.  What Apple gets wrong It is interesting, given all that it gets right, the extent to which critics like to focus on what Apple gets wrong. Some of the most common criticisms could translate into easy wins for Apple: Yes, I think it should provide more in-depth granular information to assist enterprise IT deployments, but I would also argue that its free certification courses remain the best possible way to find the answers you need to begin managing larger or newer Apple deployments. Those courses are free, well-constructed and give you a thorough grounding for this work. Though I would really like Apple to give Configurator the power to register multiple devices at once – and a little more automation would come in useful to a lot of admins, particularly in the education sector.  But what’s super-interesting about so many of the criticisms made around Apple in the enterprise is that they tend toward being smaller, more granular problems that the company could conceivably resolve once it stops pouring all of its R&D resources into AI development.  And that’s my point, really — to quietly point out that the nature of the criticisms Apple’s current enterprise solutions receive actually reflect how successfully it has penetrated the sector. It is now being asked to solve really complex questions that reflect the myriad complexities of enterprise IT requirements. It won’t solve all of them overnight, but its progress in the sector since earlier this century suggests it will probably get around to resolving many of them, one challenge at a time. And, rest assured, while Apple never speaks about it, I’m confident that the company does actually read criticism; it just needs to be selective concerning which challenges to solve first. And at times it must also consider whether those challenges will still be relevant a few years as tech deployment requirements change. Please follow me on Twitter, or join me in the AppleHolic’s bar & grill and Apple Discussions groups on MeWe. #how #apple #wins #enterprise
    WWW.COMPUTERWORLD.COM
    How Apple wins for enterprise IT
    It hasn’t been that long since Apple had no status at all in enterprise IT. Its products were used in some creative departments and at home, but that’s as far as things went. The iPod and iPhone changed all that, even while general exposure to powerful mobile tech transformed perceptions around what to expect from the tools you use at work. The Apple user experience is the company’s biggest not-so-secret weapon, and it is interesting that even decades since the first PCs appeared, Apple still delivers intuitive user experiences  people enjoy using. Consumer simple, enterprise ready Those user experiences have generated expectations, and as my old chum Dean Hager, former Jamf CEO liked to describe it, people entering the workplace wanted the systems they used there to be as easy and intuitive to understand as the Apple products they used elsewhere. Apple’s user experience eventually became something incoming enterprise employees expected — many would simply quit their job if they were using crummier tech at work than they were at home. At the end of the day, Apple won the enterprise one consumer user at a time. But the other piece to Apple’s success is that organizations that have deployed Apple products at scale have experienced significant improvements on their bottom line. Multiple reports tell us employees are happier using Apple products, they’re more productive using Apple products, and spend less on tech support on Apple products than on PCs. Staff retention rates improve even as productivity grows — and the reduced tech support costs make life easier for IT and dramatically reduce the Total Cost of Ownership of an Apple fleet.  How Apple wins for enterprise IT None of this came easy. Apple had to take its basic product (the Mac) and its OS X operating system and figure out how to best apply that tech to mobile devices. That’s what we began to get with the iPod and saw in living Technicolor with the iPhone; Apple took the power of computing and placed it inside the device you always have with you – your phone. Of course, the ability to run more complex applications on your iPhone made it possible for employees to get more work done using the device, which spawned the Bring Your Own Device wave that really began to express itself around 2010. Not only did employees want to be able to use the same platform at work as at home, but they also wanted to use the same mobile devices at work as at home. The biggest evidence of that was the abject failure of Windows Mobile as it showed people didn’t want to use the same PC they used at work in their mobile existences; they remained hooked on experience Apple’s ease-of-use.  They did then.  They do now. The evidence is everywhere You can see this is the direction of travel each time you read yet another report explaining Apple’s growing enterprise sales across all of its products, or the fast-proliferating number of Very Large Indeed Apple deployments at giant global companies. Not to mention that once employee choice schemes are put in place, the majority of employees seem to prefer Apple to any other platform. While it’s still early days on spatial computing, we can already see Vision Pro devices staking spaces across key industries as Apple takes what was once more or less the Mac experience and makes it both ambient and hyper-mobile. Spatial computing isn’t just about computing that surrounds you, it’s about computing that takes you there. Along this journey, Apple has thought deeply about what it offers and attempted to take down barriers to enterprise deployment. That’s why the company provides APIs for Mobile Device Management; that’s why it has high-grade security features I’m certain the company’s own CEO also uses, such as Lockdown Mode; that’s also why it remains so deeply committed to delivering regular software and hardware updates, so no enterprise professionals find themselves left insecure or abandoned on their workplace tech journey.  Want to do more? You can, thanks to the company’s’ rich set of developer tools, which provide a robust environment for enterprise development and integration.  Support and updates The fact that Apple’s hardware is reliable is also good for enterprise sales. Coupled with annual software updates that bring sometimes-exciting new features, user engagement remains high throughout the usable life of these devices, which now usually extends to an easy five years. Once that time is up, the resilience and reliability of the devices means they still fetch good value in the second-user markets; most major purchasers might also draw reassurance that the recycling and salvaging of the products will have some impact on their own carbon targets.  Enterprises also like reliability for another reason, it helps them plan ahead.  Not only do they know that it is unlikely Apple will make too many major changes (though we do experience smaller ones), but they also know that unlike Windows 11, you will not wake one morning to find your PC has been updated to a new operating system without consent. These little communications do count, particularly if you are running several hundred systems in your fleet. You also cannot ignore the impact of the CrowdStrike debacle on that lovely feeling of peace and calm enterprises perhaps enjoyed before it took place. Apple’s platform security may not be something we can take for granted any longer, but it still exists — and while it makes sense to stay watchful, it remains unmatched. Its major software updates remain free (at least until regulators utterly wreck the company’s business). That’s always an easy budget line item at the end of the day.  What Apple gets wrong It is interesting, given all that it gets right, the extent to which critics like to focus on what Apple gets wrong. Some of the most common criticisms could translate into easy wins for Apple: Yes, I think it should provide more in-depth granular information to assist enterprise IT deployments, but I would also argue that its free certification courses remain the best possible way to find the answers you need to begin managing larger or newer Apple deployments. Those courses are free, well-constructed and give you a thorough grounding for this work. Though I would really like Apple to give Configurator the power to register multiple devices at once – and a little more automation would come in useful to a lot of admins, particularly in the education sector.  But what’s super-interesting about so many of the criticisms made around Apple in the enterprise is that they tend toward being smaller, more granular problems that the company could conceivably resolve once it stops pouring all of its R&D resources into AI development.  And that’s my point, really — to quietly point out that the nature of the criticisms Apple’s current enterprise solutions receive actually reflect how successfully it has penetrated the sector. It is now being asked to solve really complex questions that reflect the myriad complexities of enterprise IT requirements. It won’t solve all of them overnight, but its progress in the sector since earlier this century suggests it will probably get around to resolving many of them, one challenge at a time. And, rest assured, while Apple never speaks about it, I’m confident that the company does actually read criticism; it just needs to be selective concerning which challenges to solve first. And at times it must also consider whether those challenges will still be relevant a few years as tech deployment requirements change. Please follow me on Twitter, or join me in the AppleHolic’s bar & grill and Apple Discussions groups on MeWe.
    0 Yorumlar 0 hisse senetleri
  • Made with Unity Monthly: March 2023 roundup

    Interested in seeing how fellow creators are using Unity? Look no further than this roundup of the latest made with Unity news and discover what the Unity community has been up to – including even more highlights out of GDC 2023.Games created in Unity reached some extra exciting milestones in March.To start, Sabotage Studio revealed that Sea of Starswould release in August this year, getting us pretty excited. Looking to fight for the title of mightiest of them all? Mighty DOOM by Bethesda Softworks may be the action-packed game you need.Awards season kept the milestones coming throughout the month, with congratulations in order for a handful of Unity-made projects:Academy AwardsAvatar: The Way of Water, Best Visual EffectsBAFTA Games AwardsIMMORTALITY, NarrativeRollerdrome, British GameTUNIC, Artistic Achievement and Debut GameGame Developers Choice AwardsCitizen Sleeper, Social Impact AwardIMMORTALITY, Innovation AwardPentiment, Best NarrativeIGF AwardsBetrayal at Club Low, Nuovo Award and Seumas McNally Grand PrizeThe Forest Quartet, Excellence in AudioIMMORTALITY, Excellence in NarrativeRPG Time: The Legend of Wright, Excellence in Visual ArtsSlider, Best Student GameWe share new game releases and milestone spotlights every Monday on the @UnityGames Twitter account. Be sure to give us a follow and support your fellow creators.Tuesdays are dedicated to #UnityTips on Twitter. We especially loved this one from @TheMirzaBeig featuring a quick tutorial for a great 2D outline effect:At the very end of March, we also had our friends from @BinaryImpactG take over the channel to share some of the best tips they’ve used over the years. A few notable ones include:Having an AudioSource play backwardsA convenience feature to make your components easy to useHow to randomize sprite animations so they’re not too uniformYou can find their other tips on our Twitter channel, or all of them on Binary Impact’s website. Keep tagging us and using the #UnityTips hashtag to share your expertise with the community.We’re stunned by what you all create every week, and you certainly kept the amazing projects coming in March. If we missed something from you, be sure to use the #MadeWithUnity hashtag next time you share.Twitter’s @AnderssonKev inspired us with a progress update on his adorable game, and @JuhanaMyllys shared one of the best spots to catch a nice view in their gameworld. Then, @_josueor had some cool rug animations to show, while @AlexKentDixon took us to admire some breathtaking scenery. Last but not least, @DonXugloGames’s enemy was feeling quite sleepy and in need of a good nap.On Instagram, even more happened: @canopy_design was fighting alongside ruins, and @tails_of_fate’s fox explored dungeons. We also highlighted plenty of #MadeWithUnity creators who joined us for GDC. Find an inspiring reel of them on our YouTube channel.We’re so excited to continue the #MadeWithUnity love, so keep adding the hashtag to your posts to show us what you’ve been up to.At GDC and on Twitch this month, it was all about the creators. To start, we sat down with Fika Productions to discuss Ship of Fools for March’s first Creator Spotlight stream.Next came two additional Creator Spotlight streams, covering Schell Games’s Among Us VRand Team Miaozi’s Cygnus Enterprises. Finally, we continued posting throwbacks with part two of the Let’s Dev 101 sessions on VFX Graph – from July 2022 – on YouTube.Don’t forget to follow us on Twitch and hit the notification bell so you never miss a stream.On March 30, we hosted the third Dev Blitz Day of 2023 and covered all things performance profiling. The event was held in both the forums and on the Discord server. Throughout the day, we had more than 36 threads and would like to thank everyone who participated.Keep an eye on our forum announcements and Discord for updates about future Dev Blitz Days, and don’t forget to bookmark the archive of past Dev Blitz Days.For GDC 2023, in order to bring the event to those who were unable to attend in person, the team set up a hub for the event on Discord. We created specific channels to share pictures and videos from the week, a place to discuss the event itself, and our first-ever use of Discord Stage, which brought 30 speakers online to provide overviews of in-booth sessions.We created over 40 posts, featuring 75 pictures and 22 videos, to help our community feel like they were at the event. Unity speakers also received more than 200 questions during the 14 hours we were live from the Discord Stage.Members of the Unity Insiders program were active during March, talking about the latest news on our Unity Gaming Services solutions and out of GDC. Check out some highlights:Did you know that studios that use the Unity Asset Store ship games approximately 20% faster? Don’t take it from us, hear it directly from the creators surveyed as part of the 2023 Unity Gaming Report.Taking to social media, here’s a roundup of some of our favorite creator showcases from Twitter in March:Low-Poly Big Environment Pack | Philipp SchmidtLightning Wall effect | Archanor VFXGlobal Snow 2 | KronnectDon’t forget to tag the @AssetStore Twitter account and use the #AssetStore hashtag when posting your latest creations.Last but not least, here’s a non-exhaustive list of Made with Unity titles released in March. If you see any on the list that have already become favorites or notice that something’s missing, share your thoughts in the forums. Creating with Unity and not seeing your project on the list? Submit it here for a chance to be featured.One Military Camp, Abylight BarcelonaStar Survivor, SpaceOwl GamesFigment 2: Creed Valley, Bedtime Digital GamesMiLE HiGH TAXi, Cassius John-AdamsThe Wreck, The Pixel HuntStoryteller, Daniel BenmerguiMonster Racing League, FlightlessResident Evil 4, CAPCOM Co., Ltd.Innchanted, DragonBear StudiosTerra Nil, Free LivesThe Last Worker, Oiffy, Wolf & Wood Interactive LtdDREDGE, Black Salt GamesThat’s a wrap for March! Want more community news as it happens? Don’t forget to follow us on social media: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, or Twitch.
    #made #with #unity #monthly #march
    Made with Unity Monthly: March 2023 roundup
    Interested in seeing how fellow creators are using Unity? Look no further than this roundup of the latest made with Unity news and discover what the Unity community has been up to – including even more highlights out of GDC 2023.Games created in Unity reached some extra exciting milestones in March.To start, Sabotage Studio revealed that Sea of Starswould release in August this year, getting us pretty excited. Looking to fight for the title of mightiest of them all? Mighty DOOM by Bethesda Softworks may be the action-packed game you need.Awards season kept the milestones coming throughout the month, with congratulations in order for a handful of Unity-made projects:Academy AwardsAvatar: The Way of Water, Best Visual EffectsBAFTA Games AwardsIMMORTALITY, NarrativeRollerdrome, British GameTUNIC, Artistic Achievement and Debut GameGame Developers Choice AwardsCitizen Sleeper, Social Impact AwardIMMORTALITY, Innovation AwardPentiment, Best NarrativeIGF AwardsBetrayal at Club Low, Nuovo Award and Seumas McNally Grand PrizeThe Forest Quartet, Excellence in AudioIMMORTALITY, Excellence in NarrativeRPG Time: The Legend of Wright, Excellence in Visual ArtsSlider, Best Student GameWe share new game releases and milestone spotlights every Monday on the @UnityGames Twitter account. Be sure to give us a follow and support your fellow creators.Tuesdays are dedicated to #UnityTips on Twitter. We especially loved this one from @TheMirzaBeig featuring a quick tutorial for a great 2D outline effect:At the very end of March, we also had our friends from @BinaryImpactG take over the channel to share some of the best tips they’ve used over the years. A few notable ones include:Having an AudioSource play backwardsA convenience feature to make your components easy to useHow to randomize sprite animations so they’re not too uniformYou can find their other tips on our Twitter channel, or all of them on Binary Impact’s website. Keep tagging us and using the #UnityTips hashtag to share your expertise with the community.We’re stunned by what you all create every week, and you certainly kept the amazing projects coming in March. If we missed something from you, be sure to use the #MadeWithUnity hashtag next time you share.Twitter’s @AnderssonKev inspired us with a progress update on his adorable game, and @JuhanaMyllys shared one of the best spots to catch a nice view in their gameworld. Then, @_josueor had some cool rug animations to show, while @AlexKentDixon took us to admire some breathtaking scenery. Last but not least, @DonXugloGames’s enemy was feeling quite sleepy and in need of a good nap.On Instagram, even more happened: @canopy_design was fighting alongside ruins, and @tails_of_fate’s fox explored dungeons. We also highlighted plenty of #MadeWithUnity creators who joined us for GDC. Find an inspiring reel of them on our YouTube channel.We’re so excited to continue the #MadeWithUnity love, so keep adding the hashtag to your posts to show us what you’ve been up to.At GDC and on Twitch this month, it was all about the creators. To start, we sat down with Fika Productions to discuss Ship of Fools for March’s first Creator Spotlight stream.Next came two additional Creator Spotlight streams, covering Schell Games’s Among Us VRand Team Miaozi’s Cygnus Enterprises. Finally, we continued posting throwbacks with part two of the Let’s Dev 101 sessions on VFX Graph – from July 2022 – on YouTube.Don’t forget to follow us on Twitch and hit the notification bell so you never miss a stream.On March 30, we hosted the third Dev Blitz Day of 2023 and covered all things performance profiling. The event was held in both the forums and on the Discord server. Throughout the day, we had more than 36 threads and would like to thank everyone who participated.Keep an eye on our forum announcements and Discord for updates about future Dev Blitz Days, and don’t forget to bookmark the archive of past Dev Blitz Days.For GDC 2023, in order to bring the event to those who were unable to attend in person, the team set up a hub for the event on Discord. We created specific channels to share pictures and videos from the week, a place to discuss the event itself, and our first-ever use of Discord Stage, which brought 30 speakers online to provide overviews of in-booth sessions.We created over 40 posts, featuring 75 pictures and 22 videos, to help our community feel like they were at the event. Unity speakers also received more than 200 questions during the 14 hours we were live from the Discord Stage.Members of the Unity Insiders program were active during March, talking about the latest news on our Unity Gaming Services solutions and out of GDC. Check out some highlights:Did you know that studios that use the Unity Asset Store ship games approximately 20% faster? Don’t take it from us, hear it directly from the creators surveyed as part of the 2023 Unity Gaming Report.Taking to social media, here’s a roundup of some of our favorite creator showcases from Twitter in March:Low-Poly Big Environment Pack | Philipp SchmidtLightning Wall effect | Archanor VFXGlobal Snow 2 | KronnectDon’t forget to tag the @AssetStore Twitter account and use the #AssetStore hashtag when posting your latest creations.Last but not least, here’s a non-exhaustive list of Made with Unity titles released in March. If you see any on the list that have already become favorites or notice that something’s missing, share your thoughts in the forums. Creating with Unity and not seeing your project on the list? Submit it here for a chance to be featured.One Military Camp, Abylight BarcelonaStar Survivor, SpaceOwl GamesFigment 2: Creed Valley, Bedtime Digital GamesMiLE HiGH TAXi, Cassius John-AdamsThe Wreck, The Pixel HuntStoryteller, Daniel BenmerguiMonster Racing League, FlightlessResident Evil 4, CAPCOM Co., Ltd.Innchanted, DragonBear StudiosTerra Nil, Free LivesThe Last Worker, Oiffy, Wolf & Wood Interactive LtdDREDGE, Black Salt GamesThat’s a wrap for March! Want more community news as it happens? Don’t forget to follow us on social media: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, or Twitch. #made #with #unity #monthly #march
    UNITY.COM
    Made with Unity Monthly: March 2023 roundup
    Interested in seeing how fellow creators are using Unity? Look no further than this roundup of the latest made with Unity news and discover what the Unity community has been up to – including even more highlights out of GDC 2023.Games created in Unity reached some extra exciting milestones in March.To start, Sabotage Studio revealed that Sea of Starswould release in August this year, getting us pretty excited. Looking to fight for the title of mightiest of them all? Mighty DOOM by Bethesda Softworks may be the action-packed game you need.Awards season kept the milestones coming throughout the month, with congratulations in order for a handful of Unity-made projects:Academy Awards (winners list)Avatar: The Way of Water, Best Visual EffectsBAFTA Games Awards (winners list) IMMORTALITY, NarrativeRollerdrome, British GameTUNIC, Artistic Achievement and Debut GameGame Developers Choice Awards (winners list) Citizen Sleeper, Social Impact AwardIMMORTALITY, Innovation AwardPentiment, Best NarrativeIGF Awards (winners list) Betrayal at Club Low, Nuovo Award and Seumas McNally Grand PrizeThe Forest Quartet, Excellence in AudioIMMORTALITY, Excellence in NarrativeRPG Time: The Legend of Wright, Excellence in Visual ArtsSlider, Best Student GameWe share new game releases and milestone spotlights every Monday on the @UnityGames Twitter account. Be sure to give us a follow and support your fellow creators.Tuesdays are dedicated to #UnityTips on Twitter. We especially loved this one from @TheMirzaBeig featuring a quick tutorial for a great 2D outline effect:At the very end of March, we also had our friends from @BinaryImpactG take over the channel to share some of the best tips they’ve used over the years. A few notable ones include:Having an AudioSource play backwardsA convenience feature to make your components easy to useHow to randomize sprite animations so they’re not too uniformYou can find their other tips on our Twitter channel, or all of them on Binary Impact’s website. Keep tagging us and using the #UnityTips hashtag to share your expertise with the community.We’re stunned by what you all create every week, and you certainly kept the amazing projects coming in March. If we missed something from you, be sure to use the #MadeWithUnity hashtag next time you share.Twitter’s @AnderssonKev inspired us with a progress update on his adorable game (pictured above), and @JuhanaMyllys shared one of the best spots to catch a nice view in their gameworld. Then, @_josueor had some cool rug animations to show, while @AlexKentDixon took us to admire some breathtaking scenery. Last but not least, @DonXugloGames’s enemy was feeling quite sleepy and in need of a good nap.On Instagram, even more happened: @canopy_design was fighting alongside ruins, and @tails_of_fate’s fox explored dungeons. We also highlighted plenty of #MadeWithUnity creators who joined us for GDC. Find an inspiring reel of them on our YouTube channel.We’re so excited to continue the #MadeWithUnity love, so keep adding the hashtag to your posts to show us what you’ve been up to.At GDC and on Twitch this month, it was all about the creators. To start, we sat down with Fika Productions to discuss Ship of Fools for March’s first Creator Spotlight stream. (Catch a clip from the stream above.) Next came two additional Creator Spotlight streams, covering Schell Games’s Among Us VRand Team Miaozi’s Cygnus Enterprises. Finally, we continued posting throwbacks with part two of the Let’s Dev 101 sessions on VFX Graph – from July 2022 – on YouTube.Don’t forget to follow us on Twitch and hit the notification bell so you never miss a stream.On March 30, we hosted the third Dev Blitz Day of 2023 and covered all things performance profiling. The event was held in both the forums and on the Discord server. Throughout the day, we had more than 36 threads and would like to thank everyone who participated.Keep an eye on our forum announcements and Discord for updates about future Dev Blitz Days, and don’t forget to bookmark the archive of past Dev Blitz Days.For GDC 2023, in order to bring the event to those who were unable to attend in person, the team set up a hub for the event on Discord. We created specific channels to share pictures and videos from the week, a place to discuss the event itself, and our first-ever use of Discord Stage, which brought 30 speakers online to provide overviews of in-booth sessions.We created over 40 posts, featuring 75 pictures and 22 videos, to help our community feel like they were at the event. Unity speakers also received more than 200 questions during the 14 hours we were live from the Discord Stage.Members of the Unity Insiders program were active during March, talking about the latest news on our Unity Gaming Services solutions and out of GDC. Check out some highlights:Did you know that studios that use the Unity Asset Store ship games approximately 20% faster? Don’t take it from us, hear it directly from the creators surveyed as part of the 2023 Unity Gaming Report.Taking to social media, here’s a roundup of some of our favorite creator showcases from Twitter in March:Low-Poly Big Environment Pack | Philipp SchmidtLightning Wall effect | Archanor VFXGlobal Snow 2 | KronnectDon’t forget to tag the @AssetStore Twitter account and use the #AssetStore hashtag when posting your latest creations.Last but not least, here’s a non-exhaustive list of Made with Unity titles released in March. If you see any on the list that have already become favorites or notice that something’s missing, share your thoughts in the forums. Creating with Unity and not seeing your project on the list? Submit it here for a chance to be featured.One Military Camp, Abylight Barcelona(March 2)Star Survivor, SpaceOwl Games (March 2)Figment 2: Creed Valley, Bedtime Digital Games (March 9)MiLE HiGH TAXi, Cassius John-Adams (March 13)The Wreck, The Pixel Hunt (March 14)Storyteller, Daniel Benmergui (March 23)Monster Racing League, Flightless (March 23)Resident Evil 4, CAPCOM Co., Ltd. (March 23)Innchanted, DragonBear Studios (March 28)Terra Nil, Free Lives (March 28)The Last Worker, Oiffy, Wolf & Wood Interactive Ltd (March 30)DREDGE, Black Salt Games (March 30)That’s a wrap for March! Want more community news as it happens? Don’t forget to follow us on social media: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, or Twitch.
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  • Waiting for GTA 6? These are the best-looking PS5 Pro games you can play right now

    GTA 6 is a year away, but these are the most visually impressive games you can play on your PlayStation 5 Pro in the meantime, including exclusives and even a surprise Xbox entryTech15:56, 14 May 2025Demon Souls can tide you over until GTA6Sony’s PS5 Pro had a fair mountain to climb to convince players it was worth the eye-wateringly high price of £699 when it launched in November of last year.Lacking the easily describable “the same but 4K” focus of the PS4 Pro, it’s slowly come into its own as more and more games have launched with Pro features, or had them added retroactively.‌While we put together a list of the best games to show off the console, a lot has changed since then, so we’re running it back with a fresh, expanded list.‌Here are some of the best PS5 Pro games you can play right now to help the wait for GTA 6, which could end up being the best showcase of the console.Baldur's Gate 3 is even better on PS5 ProBaldur’s Gate 3 is one of the best games of the last decade, and while its isometric perspective might have you thinking it’s not the ideal technical showcase, it really does look wonderful on PS5 Pro.Article continues belowNotably, co-op is drastically smoother on the PS5 Pro than on the base console, with a 60fps frame rate that makes it infinitely better for playing with a friend or partner.You can also hit a locked 30 FPS in Quality mode, or run it at 4K resolution and 60 FPS in Performance mode.Agent 47 has never looked better‌Hitman’s 2016 reboot and subsequent entries already looked great, even on PS4, but it’s reached new heights with PS5 Pro.The console runs IO Interactive’s huge, interconnected trilogy at 60fps with PSSR upscaling to 4K, and that makes spotting subtle details or smaller items that you can use to your advantage just a little bit easier.And, while we’re here, we’d just like to point out that considering this package contains three full games, interstitial DLC chunks, and a roguelike mode, this might be one of the most content-rich titles out there.‌Shadows is frequently stunningWe loved Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and a big part of that appeal was just how fantastic it looks at all times.On PS5, it’s a looker, but it’s on PS5 Pro where you can really see the incredible detail. The more powerful console enables ray-tracing to be enabled, while still running at a smooth 60fps.‌Considering the sheer breadth of its world, the fact it all looks so good is very impressive indeed, and shows how the PS5 Pro means developers no longer need to decide between frame rate and resolution.With the buff in resolution, you can see more projectilesA recently updated PS5 classic that got the Pro treatment four years after launch, Returnal is well worth jumping back into and still marks one of PlayStation’s weirdest, most unusual exclusives.‌Selene’s roguelike adventure sees her exploring an unsettling alien world and constantly returning back to the start when she dies, and developer Housemarque has somehow managed to wring out even more pixels on PS5 Pro.In fact, it offers two-and-a-half times the resolution boost, while maintaining a frame rate that predominantly sticks to 60fps with some 55fps drops. In fact, just writing about it has me installing it again.Monster Hunter Wilds has been a huge success for publisher Capcom‌One of 2025’s biggest commercial and critical hits so far, Monster Hunter: Wilds was, in many ways, the game I picked up a PS5 Pro for.The PS5 version is solid, but the ray-tracing and PSSR of the PS5 Pro make a huge difference to image quality. It’s pretty much the best way to play the game, too, with issues on PC.Not only that, but the PS5 Pro will hit a consistent 60 FPS which makes a huge difference when you’re tackling one of the game’s tougher monsters.‌The whole gang's here, and in an open world this timeWe know, we’re ready for Part 3, too, but if you’ve not played Rebirth yet and don’t have a powerful PC for it, PS5 Pro is a great choice.The magic of the PS5 Pro version is the Versatility Mode, which basically takes the Graphics Mode and ramps it up to 60fps.‌The result is a slicker, sharper version than you’d get in Performance Mode, while also being much more playable thanks to the improved frame rate.Spider-Man 2 offers double the fun with both Peter Parker and Miles Morales playableInsomniac Games sure knows how to wring every last bit of power out of Sony’s hardware, and after PS4 Pro was used to highlight how good the original Marvel’s Spider-Man could look, its sequel is one of the crown jewels of PS5 Pro.‌The Performance Pro mode aims for 60fps at 4K by using PSSR, and while we do love the fluidity, it’s hard not to be impressed by the Fidelity Pro mode.The idea of the latter is that it hits a consistent 30fps but with a huge amount of detail in reflections in puddles, windows, and even Spidey’s goggles. While the 4K 60fps Performance Pro mode is more fluid, you’ll struggle to find a better-looking game than the Fidelity Pro option.Forza Horizon 5 might actually look even better on PS5‌An Xbox game? On a PlayStation list? Yep, we get it, it still just feels… wrong somehow, but thankfully, Forza Horizon 5 is a stunning showcase of the PS5 Pro.It’s absolutely stunning in motion on any console, but the PS5 Pro adds much more foliage in Performance mode. That sounds like a small detail, but when you factor in that additional detail and the 4K resolution, it’s the best way to play–even over the Xbox Series X original.And that’s before we touch on the player’s cars offering ray-traced reflections. Seriously, play the game’s opening and prepare to be wowed.‌Demon's Souls remains one of the best-looking PS5 games aroundIf there’s one genre that you want high frame rates in, it’s the Soulslike. When even the slightest miscalculation can cost you dearly, you’ll want the PS5 Pro in your corner.In Demon’s Souls, the 2020 remake of the PS3 original, Bluepoint Games has somehow achieved what felt impossible when the PS5 version launched–it runs at 60fps, while also maintaining a 4K resolution.‌That means there is literally zero downside, and the team even managed to add in improved shadows, too. A must-play for action game fans on Sony’s Pro console.Alan Wake 2 is scarily prettyAlan Wake 2 is one of the most impressive-looking games of the last few years, and Remedy continues to update it to incorporate new features.‌The survival horror game reaches new heights on PS5 Pro, though, adding in ray-traced lighting and reflections that make it feel even more at the bleeding edge of gaming visuals.You can also turn off ray-tracing and just enjoy a fantastic 60fps experience instead, which still looks even prettier than the PS5 version.Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a true showcase of the PS5 ProArticle continues belowAnother heavy-hitter from 2025, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is absolutely massive in scale, offering two huge open-world maps, a whole host of NPCs and overlapping game systems.While PS5’s Quality Mode hits 4K resolution, it can only do so at 30fps. As you’d probably guess from this list, PS5 Pro doubles that to 60fps at 4K, which is no mean feat given how much of the game there is here.For the latest breaking news and stories from across the globe from the Daily Star, sign up for our newsletters.‌‌‌
    #waiting #gta #these #are #bestlooking
    Waiting for GTA 6? These are the best-looking PS5 Pro games you can play right now
    GTA 6 is a year away, but these are the most visually impressive games you can play on your PlayStation 5 Pro in the meantime, including exclusives and even a surprise Xbox entryTech15:56, 14 May 2025Demon Souls can tide you over until GTA6Sony’s PS5 Pro had a fair mountain to climb to convince players it was worth the eye-wateringly high price of £699 when it launched in November of last year.Lacking the easily describable “the same but 4K” focus of the PS4 Pro, it’s slowly come into its own as more and more games have launched with Pro features, or had them added retroactively.‌While we put together a list of the best games to show off the console, a lot has changed since then, so we’re running it back with a fresh, expanded list.‌Here are some of the best PS5 Pro games you can play right now to help the wait for GTA 6, which could end up being the best showcase of the console.Baldur's Gate 3 is even better on PS5 ProBaldur’s Gate 3 is one of the best games of the last decade, and while its isometric perspective might have you thinking it’s not the ideal technical showcase, it really does look wonderful on PS5 Pro.Article continues belowNotably, co-op is drastically smoother on the PS5 Pro than on the base console, with a 60fps frame rate that makes it infinitely better for playing with a friend or partner.You can also hit a locked 30 FPS in Quality mode, or run it at 4K resolution and 60 FPS in Performance mode.Agent 47 has never looked better‌Hitman’s 2016 reboot and subsequent entries already looked great, even on PS4, but it’s reached new heights with PS5 Pro.The console runs IO Interactive’s huge, interconnected trilogy at 60fps with PSSR upscaling to 4K, and that makes spotting subtle details or smaller items that you can use to your advantage just a little bit easier.And, while we’re here, we’d just like to point out that considering this package contains three full games, interstitial DLC chunks, and a roguelike mode, this might be one of the most content-rich titles out there.‌Shadows is frequently stunningWe loved Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and a big part of that appeal was just how fantastic it looks at all times.On PS5, it’s a looker, but it’s on PS5 Pro where you can really see the incredible detail. The more powerful console enables ray-tracing to be enabled, while still running at a smooth 60fps.‌Considering the sheer breadth of its world, the fact it all looks so good is very impressive indeed, and shows how the PS5 Pro means developers no longer need to decide between frame rate and resolution.With the buff in resolution, you can see more projectilesA recently updated PS5 classic that got the Pro treatment four years after launch, Returnal is well worth jumping back into and still marks one of PlayStation’s weirdest, most unusual exclusives.‌Selene’s roguelike adventure sees her exploring an unsettling alien world and constantly returning back to the start when she dies, and developer Housemarque has somehow managed to wring out even more pixels on PS5 Pro.In fact, it offers two-and-a-half times the resolution boost, while maintaining a frame rate that predominantly sticks to 60fps with some 55fps drops. In fact, just writing about it has me installing it again.Monster Hunter Wilds has been a huge success for publisher Capcom‌One of 2025’s biggest commercial and critical hits so far, Monster Hunter: Wilds was, in many ways, the game I picked up a PS5 Pro for.The PS5 version is solid, but the ray-tracing and PSSR of the PS5 Pro make a huge difference to image quality. It’s pretty much the best way to play the game, too, with issues on PC.Not only that, but the PS5 Pro will hit a consistent 60 FPS which makes a huge difference when you’re tackling one of the game’s tougher monsters.‌The whole gang's here, and in an open world this timeWe know, we’re ready for Part 3, too, but if you’ve not played Rebirth yet and don’t have a powerful PC for it, PS5 Pro is a great choice.The magic of the PS5 Pro version is the Versatility Mode, which basically takes the Graphics Mode and ramps it up to 60fps.‌The result is a slicker, sharper version than you’d get in Performance Mode, while also being much more playable thanks to the improved frame rate.Spider-Man 2 offers double the fun with both Peter Parker and Miles Morales playableInsomniac Games sure knows how to wring every last bit of power out of Sony’s hardware, and after PS4 Pro was used to highlight how good the original Marvel’s Spider-Man could look, its sequel is one of the crown jewels of PS5 Pro.‌The Performance Pro mode aims for 60fps at 4K by using PSSR, and while we do love the fluidity, it’s hard not to be impressed by the Fidelity Pro mode.The idea of the latter is that it hits a consistent 30fps but with a huge amount of detail in reflections in puddles, windows, and even Spidey’s goggles. While the 4K 60fps Performance Pro mode is more fluid, you’ll struggle to find a better-looking game than the Fidelity Pro option.Forza Horizon 5 might actually look even better on PS5‌An Xbox game? On a PlayStation list? Yep, we get it, it still just feels… wrong somehow, but thankfully, Forza Horizon 5 is a stunning showcase of the PS5 Pro.It’s absolutely stunning in motion on any console, but the PS5 Pro adds much more foliage in Performance mode. That sounds like a small detail, but when you factor in that additional detail and the 4K resolution, it’s the best way to play–even over the Xbox Series X original.And that’s before we touch on the player’s cars offering ray-traced reflections. Seriously, play the game’s opening and prepare to be wowed.‌Demon's Souls remains one of the best-looking PS5 games aroundIf there’s one genre that you want high frame rates in, it’s the Soulslike. When even the slightest miscalculation can cost you dearly, you’ll want the PS5 Pro in your corner.In Demon’s Souls, the 2020 remake of the PS3 original, Bluepoint Games has somehow achieved what felt impossible when the PS5 version launched–it runs at 60fps, while also maintaining a 4K resolution.‌That means there is literally zero downside, and the team even managed to add in improved shadows, too. A must-play for action game fans on Sony’s Pro console.Alan Wake 2 is scarily prettyAlan Wake 2 is one of the most impressive-looking games of the last few years, and Remedy continues to update it to incorporate new features.‌The survival horror game reaches new heights on PS5 Pro, though, adding in ray-traced lighting and reflections that make it feel even more at the bleeding edge of gaming visuals.You can also turn off ray-tracing and just enjoy a fantastic 60fps experience instead, which still looks even prettier than the PS5 version.Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a true showcase of the PS5 ProArticle continues belowAnother heavy-hitter from 2025, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is absolutely massive in scale, offering two huge open-world maps, a whole host of NPCs and overlapping game systems.While PS5’s Quality Mode hits 4K resolution, it can only do so at 30fps. As you’d probably guess from this list, PS5 Pro doubles that to 60fps at 4K, which is no mean feat given how much of the game there is here.For the latest breaking news and stories from across the globe from the Daily Star, sign up for our newsletters.‌‌‌ #waiting #gta #these #are #bestlooking
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    Waiting for GTA 6? These are the best-looking PS5 Pro games you can play right now
    GTA 6 is a year away, but these are the most visually impressive games you can play on your PlayStation 5 Pro in the meantime, including exclusives and even a surprise Xbox entryTech15:56, 14 May 2025Demon Souls can tide you over until GTA6Sony’s PS5 Pro had a fair mountain to climb to convince players it was worth the eye-wateringly high price of £699 when it launched in November of last year.Lacking the easily describable “the same but 4K” focus of the PS4 Pro, it’s slowly come into its own as more and more games have launched with Pro features, or had them added retroactively.‌While we put together a list of the best games to show off the console, a lot has changed since then, so we’re running it back with a fresh, expanded list.‌Here are some of the best PS5 Pro games you can play right now to help the wait for GTA 6, which could end up being the best showcase of the console.Baldur's Gate 3 is even better on PS5 Pro(Image: Steam)Baldur’s Gate 3 is one of the best games of the last decade, and while its isometric perspective might have you thinking it’s not the ideal technical showcase, it really does look wonderful on PS5 Pro.Article continues belowNotably, co-op is drastically smoother on the PS5 Pro than on the base console, with a 60fps frame rate that makes it infinitely better for playing with a friend or partner.You can also hit a locked 30 FPS in Quality mode, or run it at 4K resolution and 60 FPS in Performance mode.Agent 47 has never looked better‌Hitman’s 2016 reboot and subsequent entries already looked great, even on PS4, but it’s reached new heights with PS5 Pro.The console runs IO Interactive’s huge, interconnected trilogy at 60fps with PSSR upscaling to 4K, and that makes spotting subtle details or smaller items that you can use to your advantage just a little bit easier.And, while we’re here, we’d just like to point out that considering this package contains three full games, interstitial DLC chunks, and a roguelike mode, this might be one of the most content-rich titles out there.‌Shadows is frequently stunningWe loved Assassin’s Creed Shadows, and a big part of that appeal was just how fantastic it looks at all times.On PS5, it’s a looker, but it’s on PS5 Pro where you can really see the incredible detail. The more powerful console enables ray-tracing to be enabled, while still running at a smooth 60fps.‌Considering the sheer breadth of its world, the fact it all looks so good is very impressive indeed, and shows how the PS5 Pro means developers no longer need to decide between frame rate and resolution.With the buff in resolution, you can see more projectilesA recently updated PS5 classic that got the Pro treatment four years after launch (no, we can’t believe it either), Returnal is well worth jumping back into and still marks one of PlayStation’s weirdest, most unusual exclusives.‌Selene’s roguelike adventure sees her exploring an unsettling alien world and constantly returning back to the start when she dies, and developer Housemarque has somehow managed to wring out even more pixels on PS5 Pro.In fact, it offers two-and-a-half times the resolution boost, while maintaining a frame rate that predominantly sticks to 60fps with some 55fps drops. In fact, just writing about it has me installing it again.Monster Hunter Wilds has been a huge success for publisher Capcom(Image: Capcom)‌One of 2025’s biggest commercial and critical hits so far, Monster Hunter: Wilds was, in many ways, the game I picked up a PS5 Pro for.The PS5 version is solid, but the ray-tracing and PSSR of the PS5 Pro make a huge difference to image quality. It’s pretty much the best way to play the game, too, with issues on PC.Not only that, but the PS5 Pro will hit a consistent 60 FPS which makes a huge difference when you’re tackling one of the game’s tougher monsters.‌The whole gang's here, and in an open world this time(Image: Square Enix / Creative Business Unit I)We know, we’re ready for Part 3, too, but if you’ve not played Rebirth yet and don’t have a powerful PC for it, PS5 Pro is a great choice.The magic of the PS5 Pro version is the Versatility Mode, which basically takes the Graphics Mode and ramps it up to 60fps.‌The result is a slicker, sharper version than you’d get in Performance Mode, while also being much more playable thanks to the improved frame rate.Spider-Man 2 offers double the fun with both Peter Parker and Miles Morales playable(Image: Insomniac Games/Sony)Insomniac Games sure knows how to wring every last bit of power out of Sony’s hardware, and after PS4 Pro was used to highlight how good the original Marvel’s Spider-Man could look, its sequel is one of the crown jewels of PS5 Pro.‌The Performance Pro mode aims for 60fps at 4K by using PSSR, and while we do love the fluidity, it’s hard not to be impressed by the Fidelity Pro mode.The idea of the latter is that it hits a consistent 30fps but with a huge amount of detail in reflections in puddles, windows, and even Spidey’s goggles. While the 4K 60fps Performance Pro mode is more fluid, you’ll struggle to find a better-looking game than the Fidelity Pro option.Forza Horizon 5 might actually look even better on PS5‌An Xbox game? On a PlayStation list? Yep, we get it, it still just feels… wrong somehow, but thankfully, Forza Horizon 5 is a stunning showcase of the PS5 Pro.It’s absolutely stunning in motion on any console, but the PS5 Pro adds much more foliage in Performance mode. That sounds like a small detail, but when you factor in that additional detail and the 4K resolution, it’s the best way to play–even over the Xbox Series X original.And that’s before we touch on the player’s cars offering ray-traced reflections. Seriously, play the game’s opening and prepare to be wowed.‌Demon's Souls remains one of the best-looking PS5 games aroundIf there’s one genre that you want high frame rates in, it’s the Soulslike. When even the slightest miscalculation can cost you dearly, you’ll want the PS5 Pro in your corner.In Demon’s Souls, the 2020 remake of the PS3 original, Bluepoint Games has somehow achieved what felt impossible when the PS5 version launched–it runs at 60fps, while also maintaining a 4K resolution.‌That means there is literally zero downside, and the team even managed to add in improved shadows, too. A must-play for action game fans on Sony’s Pro console.Alan Wake 2 is scarily pretty (get it?)Alan Wake 2 is one of the most impressive-looking games of the last few years, and Remedy continues to update it to incorporate new features.‌The survival horror game reaches new heights on PS5 Pro, though, adding in ray-traced lighting and reflections that make it feel even more at the bleeding edge of gaming visuals.You can also turn off ray-tracing and just enjoy a fantastic 60fps experience instead, which still looks even prettier than the PS5 version.Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 is a true showcase of the PS5 Pro(Image: Warhorse Studios)Article continues belowAnother heavy-hitter from 2025, Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 is absolutely massive in scale, offering two huge open-world maps, a whole host of NPCs and overlapping game systems.While PS5’s Quality Mode hits 4K resolution, it can only do so at 30fps. As you’d probably guess from this list, PS5 Pro doubles that to 60fps at 4K, which is no mean feat given how much of the game there is here.For the latest breaking news and stories from across the globe from the Daily Star, sign up for our newsletters.‌‌‌
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  • #333;">Why one obscure app could help crumble Meta’s empire
    If the question, “Who is Meta’s biggest rival?” were on a Family Feud survey, TikTok would likely be the winning answer.
    In the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust case against the Facebook and Instagram owner, the government’s response probably wouldn’t even make the top 10: a small blockchain-based platform called MeWe.
    MeWe looks a fair amount like Facebook at first glance, except that you make an account using the Frequency blockchain — which the company explains is a decentralized protocol that lets you move your social connections to other (mostly hypothetical at this point) apps that support Frequency.
    The company says 20 million users have joined, but when I make a MeWe account and log in, I scroll through my autopopulated feed and think, “Who are these people?” I search for a few of my Verge colleagues, figuring if anyone has tried this obscure app, it might be one of them, but I come up short.
    I try some public figures: Tim Cook? Jeff Bezos? Mark Zuckerberg? There are some accounts with these names, but it seems unlikely they’re the ones I have in mind.The claim that MeWe is a closer competitor to Facebook and Instagram than TikTok might be baffling if you’re not steeped in antitrust law or the specifics of the FTC’s complaint.
    Meta CEO Zuckerberg testified he hadn’t even heard of the app before this case was filed.
    But the FTC has spent the past three weeks laying out its logic.
    Using Meta’s own internal discussions about how it views itself and its competition, it says that Meta has historically, and to this day, competed in a market for connecting with friends and family online — and when it saw its dominance in that space threatened by the rise of Instagram and WhatsApp, it bought them to squash the competition.Whether Judge James Boasberg buys this could determine who wins the case — if the FTC can also show that Meta acted illegally through its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp to solidify its alleged monopoly power.Antitrust law is supposed to ensure fair competition, which usually means that people have options for a useful class of goods and services — what’s known as a relevant market.
    The FTC says that here, that market is “personal social networking services,” or PSNs: spaces where a core purpose is helping people connect with friends and family.
    While there are many online platforms that overlap with Meta’s services, the FTC argues that virtually none of them serve that market.
    If internet users want to find and hang out with people they know — as opposed to, say, watching influencers or making work connections — then it’s Mark Zuckerberg’s way or… in the government’s telling, Snapchat, BeReal, and MeWe.
    Beyond that core definition, PSNs have some other unique features and norms: The apps feature a social graph of users’ friends and family connections, as opposed to mapping users primarily based on their interests.
    Users can look up and find people they know in real life.
    And they come to the app to share personal updates with those people.Facebook and Instagram increasingly display videos and photos from influencers and celebrities, but the FTC argues personal social networking remains a core service.
    It used Instagram chief Adam Mosseri’s testimony to most clearly make this point.
    In that testimony as well as posts to his own Instagram account, Mosseri said that it’s still important for the app to connect users with their friends.
    The FTC argues that even if that use case is a smaller portion of what Meta’s apps do these days, it’s still a significant need users have that can virtually only be fulfilled by Facebook and Instagram.
    While someone might connect with people they know in real life on LinkedIn, they likely won’t primarily share personal updates there.
    And while they also could follow and interact with people they know on TikTok or YouTube, they’re more likely to passively watch videos from people they don’t.Meta says this is an entirely wrong way to think about it.
    Social media platforms compete for users’ time and attention, so whether a particular app is squarely aimed at so-called friends and family sharing is beside the point.
    Facebook and Instagram have evolved to show more content from people like influencers, shifting further from the use case the FTC says Meta has illegally dominated.
    The company has already landed some important points that could help its case, and it will get more time to push back on the agency’s framing when it calls its own witnesses in the coming weeks.But as the FTC’s case-in-chief continues into its fifth week, its argument for Meta’s dominance is becoming a lot clearer.Why do people use Facebook?When defining a market, each side is trying to answer a key question: why are people choosing one particular company’s product? A lot of goods and services compete with each other in some sense, but this doesn’t mean they serve the same niche.
    In the case of sodas, for example, “you could buy lemon-lime, but many people would never see that as a close substitute for buying Coke or Pepsi,” says George Washington Law professor and former FTC Chair Bill Kovacic.
    In the tech world, Netflix has claimed its biggest competitors are Fortnite and sleep — but those comparisons probably wouldn’t stand up in court.The FTC says that outside of Facebook and Instagram, only apps like Snapchat and MeWe can fulfill a users’ desire to broadcast personal updates with friends and family online.
    To make its case, it brought in a string of executives from other social media companies to explain why their apps can’t quite scratch the same itch for users.
    Strava’s former VP of connected partnerships Mateo Ortega testified that sure, users of the fitness-tracking social media app could share baby photos on the platform, but they probably wouldn’t unless it was in a running stroller.
    “It’s all about fitness, and while you can post other stuff, it just doesn’t seem as relevant,” he said.
    “You could buy lemon-lime, but many people would never see that as a close substitute for buying Coke or Pepsi”Pinterest’s former head of user growth Julia Roberts testified that users who come to Pinterest “expecting it to be like other social media apps … tend to be confused about how to use the product.” That’s because the app is so much not about connecting with other people that it works much differently from other social media platforms.
    Pinterest is more about finding things users are interested in, she said, so “following is not a big part of the Pinterest experience.”TikTok has a tab where users can watch videos from their friends — identified as people who mutually follow each other.
    But head of operations Adam Presser testified only about 1 percent of videos watched on the platform are there.
    The company doesn’t think of itself as competing with Meta’s apps for personal social networking, he testified.
    And even though side-by-side screenshots of TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts look identical, Presser said, “when you click out of this view for these other platforms, you would get to essentially what I think of as their core business,” which for Instagram, includes a feed and stories that often contain at least some content from family and friends.At times, Meta’s cross-examination of rival company executives showed the limits of apps’ similarities.
    When questioning Apple director of product marketing Ronak Shah, Meta sought to show that group chats in Apple’s messaging feature could serve as a social media feed for friends and family sharing.
    But Shah testified that feed would be limited to 32 people at most, and users can’t just look up each others’ profiles like they would on social platforms.
    Still, Meta pointed out, Apple’s messages app is listed under social media on its own app store.However, Meta also made important arguments about why the judge should question the FTC’s framing.
    It pointed out that some documents from TikTok and YouTube owner Google claiming their products are very different from Meta’s were submitted to foreign officials to try to avoid getting drafted into potentially frustrating regulations.
    It also pointed out when TikTok briefly went dark in the US ahead of a (now-aborted) ban, users flocked to Meta apps, showing consumers see it as a substitute on at least some level.
    That’s because, Meta argued, competition for users is really about winning their time and attention.Companies can “sometimes make mistakes.
    They misjudge who their users are”But X VP of product Keith Coleman testified it’s not that useful to think about competition this way.
    Instead, “it’s much more helpful to understand what people are trying to accomplish in their lives and to try to help them accomplish that.” Under former CEO Jack Dorsey, then-Twitter leaned into focusing on news and users’ interests, Coleman testified, because that’s why people were coming to the platform.
    Coleman was later surprised at how his own website characterized the product in its help center as a “service for friends, family, and coworkers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent messages.” “I can’t believe that’s on the website,” he said.
    “That’s pretty wacky.”This point was “a caution that not everything a company writes down or says is necessarily decisive in establishing what the boundary of a market is,” Kovacic said.
    Companies can “sometimes make mistakes.
    They misjudge who their users are.”There are real ramifications for internet users here.
    Going back to Netflix’s comparisons, if the streaming video service went down, some people would probably be happy to play a video game or get a few hours of shut-eye instead.
    But others would be frustrated that they couldn’t watch a movie, which is why it’s good that Hulu, HBO, and Amazon Prime Video also exist.
    The FTC’s argument isn’t that Meta owns the only social apps on the internet, it’s that the company faces little competition for a service many people specifically want — so the fact that you probably don’t know anyone using MeWe is sort of the point.How will the judge decide?Ultimately, Boasberg’s market definition — whether it’s Meta’s, the FTC’s, or his own — will come down to a few things: how Meta views itself, how competitors see it, and his own intuition, says Kovacic.
    ”Notice how much the FTC has been questioning Meta witnesses on the basis of its own internal documents,” he says.
    “Does the story in the courtroom match the story of your own internal documents?” So far, the documents have shown that Meta has clocked that at least some portion of users come to its products to connect with family and friends, but also that the rise of TikTok has had it looking over its shoulder.
    In September 2020, Meta told its board that Instagram revenue would be “meaningfully lower” than planned in the second half of the fiscal year because TikTok was drawing users’ attention.
    But other internal documents have shown Meta’s well aware that at different points in time, users have come to its apps to connect with family and friends, and worriedly took note of other apps entering that space.
    In a 2018 presentation, Meta found that the highest percentage of surveyed users said they come to Facebook, Instagram, and Snap to “see daily casual moments” and “see special moments.” By contrast, users came to Twitter’s feed for news and YouTube’s for entertainment.
    And even as Instagram expands into entertainment, the FTC notes that it still advertises its sign-up page as a place to “see photos and videos from your friends.”“Instagram will always need to focus on friends”In a 2018 email, Zuckerberg told Mosseri that “Instagram will always need to focus on friends.” And even though a lot has changed in the social media landscape since then, Mosseri testified that to this day on the app, “friends are an important part of the experience.” Even though users may share fewer of their own updates on Facebook and Instagram, Mosseri admitted that two friends talking in the comments of a public figure’s post counts as an interaction between friends — and one that Instagram actively tries to facilitate.Meta has argued that this special focus on friends and family sharing makes up a shrinking portion of its offerings as it works to compete with fierce rivals like TikTok.
    But the FTC says it’s still significant enough to monopolize.
    It’s a scenario that came up in another major tech monopolization case, Kovacic says: the late-1990s lawsuit US v.
    Microsoft.
    In that case, Microsoft argued the Justice Department was ignoring how computing would soon move beyond the personal computer to the Internet of Things, meaning it couldn’t truly lock up the computing ecosystem as much as the government alleged.“Judge Jackson in the Microsoft case said, yeah, those things are happening, but not happening fast enough to deny you real market power in this PC and laptop-based market that the Justice Department is emphasizing,” Kovacic says.Still, he adds, a market niche can at some point become so small that it’s no longer significant in the eyes of antitrust law.
    “You can have a process of change that ultimately renders the market segment unimportant,” he says.
    “And the hard task of analysis for the judge is to say, has it already happened?”See More:
    #666;">المصدر: https://www.theverge.com/antitrust/665308/meta-ftc-antitrust-trial-market-definition-tiktok-mewe-snap" style="color: #0066cc; text-decoration: none;">www.theverge.com
    #0066cc;">#why #one #obscure #app #could #help #crumble #metas #empire #the #question #who #biggest #rival #were #family #feud #survey #tiktok #would #likely #winning #answerin #federal #trade #commissions #antitrust #case #against #facebook #and #instagram #owner #governments #response #probably #wouldnt #even #make #top #small #blockchainbased #platform #called #mewemewe #looks #fair #amount #like #first #glance #except #that #you #account #using #frequency #blockchain #which #company #explains #decentralized #protocol #lets #move #your #social #connections #other #mostly #hypothetical #this #point #apps #support #frequencythe #says #million #users #have #joined #but #when #mewe #log #scroll #through #autopopulated #feed #think #are #these #people #search #for #few #verge #colleagues #figuring #anyone #has #tried #might #them #come #shorti #try #some #public #figures #tim #cook #jeff #bezos #mark #zuckerberg #there #accounts #with #names #seems #unlikely #theyre #ones #mindthe 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#talking #comments #counts #interaction #between #actively #tries #facilitatemeta #makes #shrinking #offerings #fierce #rivals #tiktokbut #enough #monopolizeits #scenario #another #major #monopolization #late1990s #lawsuit #vmicrosoftin #microsoft #justice #department #ignoring #computing #soon #beyond #computer #meaning #truly #lock #ecosystem #government #allegedjudge #jackson #yeah #happening #fast #deny #power #laptopbased #emphasizing #saysstill #adds #niche #become #longer #eyes #lawyou #process #change #ultimately #renders #segment #unimportant #saysand #hard #task #analysis #happenedsee
    Why one obscure app could help crumble Meta’s empire
    If the question, “Who is Meta’s biggest rival?” were on a Family Feud survey, TikTok would likely be the winning answer. In the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust case against the Facebook and Instagram owner, the government’s response probably wouldn’t even make the top 10: a small blockchain-based platform called MeWe. MeWe looks a fair amount like Facebook at first glance, except that you make an account using the Frequency blockchain — which the company explains is a decentralized protocol that lets you move your social connections to other (mostly hypothetical at this point) apps that support Frequency. The company says 20 million users have joined, but when I make a MeWe account and log in, I scroll through my autopopulated feed and think, “Who are these people?” I search for a few of my Verge colleagues, figuring if anyone has tried this obscure app, it might be one of them, but I come up short. I try some public figures: Tim Cook? Jeff Bezos? Mark Zuckerberg? There are some accounts with these names, but it seems unlikely they’re the ones I have in mind.The claim that MeWe is a closer competitor to Facebook and Instagram than TikTok might be baffling if you’re not steeped in antitrust law or the specifics of the FTC’s complaint. Meta CEO Zuckerberg testified he hadn’t even heard of the app before this case was filed. But the FTC has spent the past three weeks laying out its logic. Using Meta’s own internal discussions about how it views itself and its competition, it says that Meta has historically, and to this day, competed in a market for connecting with friends and family online — and when it saw its dominance in that space threatened by the rise of Instagram and WhatsApp, it bought them to squash the competition.Whether Judge James Boasberg buys this could determine who wins the case — if the FTC can also show that Meta acted illegally through its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp to solidify its alleged monopoly power.Antitrust law is supposed to ensure fair competition, which usually means that people have options for a useful class of goods and services — what’s known as a relevant market. The FTC says that here, that market is “personal social networking services,” or PSNs: spaces where a core purpose is helping people connect with friends and family. While there are many online platforms that overlap with Meta’s services, the FTC argues that virtually none of them serve that market. If internet users want to find and hang out with people they know — as opposed to, say, watching influencers or making work connections — then it’s Mark Zuckerberg’s way or… in the government’s telling, Snapchat, BeReal, and MeWe. Beyond that core definition, PSNs have some other unique features and norms: The apps feature a social graph of users’ friends and family connections, as opposed to mapping users primarily based on their interests. Users can look up and find people they know in real life. And they come to the app to share personal updates with those people.Facebook and Instagram increasingly display videos and photos from influencers and celebrities, but the FTC argues personal social networking remains a core service. It used Instagram chief Adam Mosseri’s testimony to most clearly make this point. In that testimony as well as posts to his own Instagram account, Mosseri said that it’s still important for the app to connect users with their friends. The FTC argues that even if that use case is a smaller portion of what Meta’s apps do these days, it’s still a significant need users have that can virtually only be fulfilled by Facebook and Instagram. While someone might connect with people they know in real life on LinkedIn, they likely won’t primarily share personal updates there. And while they also could follow and interact with people they know on TikTok or YouTube, they’re more likely to passively watch videos from people they don’t.Meta says this is an entirely wrong way to think about it. Social media platforms compete for users’ time and attention, so whether a particular app is squarely aimed at so-called friends and family sharing is beside the point. Facebook and Instagram have evolved to show more content from people like influencers, shifting further from the use case the FTC says Meta has illegally dominated. The company has already landed some important points that could help its case, and it will get more time to push back on the agency’s framing when it calls its own witnesses in the coming weeks.But as the FTC’s case-in-chief continues into its fifth week, its argument for Meta’s dominance is becoming a lot clearer.Why do people use Facebook?When defining a market, each side is trying to answer a key question: why are people choosing one particular company’s product? A lot of goods and services compete with each other in some sense, but this doesn’t mean they serve the same niche. In the case of sodas, for example, “you could buy lemon-lime, but many people would never see that as a close substitute for buying Coke or Pepsi,” says George Washington Law professor and former FTC Chair Bill Kovacic. In the tech world, Netflix has claimed its biggest competitors are Fortnite and sleep — but those comparisons probably wouldn’t stand up in court.The FTC says that outside of Facebook and Instagram, only apps like Snapchat and MeWe can fulfill a users’ desire to broadcast personal updates with friends and family online. To make its case, it brought in a string of executives from other social media companies to explain why their apps can’t quite scratch the same itch for users. Strava’s former VP of connected partnerships Mateo Ortega testified that sure, users of the fitness-tracking social media app could share baby photos on the platform, but they probably wouldn’t unless it was in a running stroller. “It’s all about fitness, and while you can post other stuff, it just doesn’t seem as relevant,” he said. “You could buy lemon-lime, but many people would never see that as a close substitute for buying Coke or Pepsi”Pinterest’s former head of user growth Julia Roberts testified that users who come to Pinterest “expecting it to be like other social media apps … tend to be confused about how to use the product.” That’s because the app is so much not about connecting with other people that it works much differently from other social media platforms. Pinterest is more about finding things users are interested in, she said, so “following is not a big part of the Pinterest experience.”TikTok has a tab where users can watch videos from their friends — identified as people who mutually follow each other. But head of operations Adam Presser testified only about 1 percent of videos watched on the platform are there. The company doesn’t think of itself as competing with Meta’s apps for personal social networking, he testified. And even though side-by-side screenshots of TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts look identical, Presser said, “when you click out of this view for these other platforms, you would get to essentially what I think of as their core business,” which for Instagram, includes a feed and stories that often contain at least some content from family and friends.At times, Meta’s cross-examination of rival company executives showed the limits of apps’ similarities. When questioning Apple director of product marketing Ronak Shah, Meta sought to show that group chats in Apple’s messaging feature could serve as a social media feed for friends and family sharing. But Shah testified that feed would be limited to 32 people at most, and users can’t just look up each others’ profiles like they would on social platforms. Still, Meta pointed out, Apple’s messages app is listed under social media on its own app store.However, Meta also made important arguments about why the judge should question the FTC’s framing. It pointed out that some documents from TikTok and YouTube owner Google claiming their products are very different from Meta’s were submitted to foreign officials to try to avoid getting drafted into potentially frustrating regulations. It also pointed out when TikTok briefly went dark in the US ahead of a (now-aborted) ban, users flocked to Meta apps, showing consumers see it as a substitute on at least some level. That’s because, Meta argued, competition for users is really about winning their time and attention.Companies can “sometimes make mistakes. They misjudge who their users are”But X VP of product Keith Coleman testified it’s not that useful to think about competition this way. Instead, “it’s much more helpful to understand what people are trying to accomplish in their lives and to try to help them accomplish that.” Under former CEO Jack Dorsey, then-Twitter leaned into focusing on news and users’ interests, Coleman testified, because that’s why people were coming to the platform. Coleman was later surprised at how his own website characterized the product in its help center as a “service for friends, family, and coworkers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent messages.” “I can’t believe that’s on the website,” he said. “That’s pretty wacky.”This point was “a caution that not everything a company writes down or says is necessarily decisive in establishing what the boundary of a market is,” Kovacic said. Companies can “sometimes make mistakes. They misjudge who their users are.”There are real ramifications for internet users here. Going back to Netflix’s comparisons, if the streaming video service went down, some people would probably be happy to play a video game or get a few hours of shut-eye instead. But others would be frustrated that they couldn’t watch a movie, which is why it’s good that Hulu, HBO, and Amazon Prime Video also exist. The FTC’s argument isn’t that Meta owns the only social apps on the internet, it’s that the company faces little competition for a service many people specifically want — so the fact that you probably don’t know anyone using MeWe is sort of the point.How will the judge decide?Ultimately, Boasberg’s market definition — whether it’s Meta’s, the FTC’s, or his own — will come down to a few things: how Meta views itself, how competitors see it, and his own intuition, says Kovacic. ”Notice how much the FTC has been questioning Meta witnesses on the basis of its own internal documents,” he says. “Does the story in the courtroom match the story of your own internal documents?” So far, the documents have shown that Meta has clocked that at least some portion of users come to its products to connect with family and friends, but also that the rise of TikTok has had it looking over its shoulder. In September 2020, Meta told its board that Instagram revenue would be “meaningfully lower” than planned in the second half of the fiscal year because TikTok was drawing users’ attention. But other internal documents have shown Meta’s well aware that at different points in time, users have come to its apps to connect with family and friends, and worriedly took note of other apps entering that space. In a 2018 presentation, Meta found that the highest percentage of surveyed users said they come to Facebook, Instagram, and Snap to “see daily casual moments” and “see special moments.” By contrast, users came to Twitter’s feed for news and YouTube’s for entertainment. And even as Instagram expands into entertainment, the FTC notes that it still advertises its sign-up page as a place to “see photos and videos from your friends.”“Instagram will always need to focus on friends”In a 2018 email, Zuckerberg told Mosseri that “Instagram will always need to focus on friends.” And even though a lot has changed in the social media landscape since then, Mosseri testified that to this day on the app, “friends are an important part of the experience.” Even though users may share fewer of their own updates on Facebook and Instagram, Mosseri admitted that two friends talking in the comments of a public figure’s post counts as an interaction between friends — and one that Instagram actively tries to facilitate.Meta has argued that this special focus on friends and family sharing makes up a shrinking portion of its offerings as it works to compete with fierce rivals like TikTok. But the FTC says it’s still significant enough to monopolize. It’s a scenario that came up in another major tech monopolization case, Kovacic says: the late-1990s lawsuit US v. Microsoft. In that case, Microsoft argued the Justice Department was ignoring how computing would soon move beyond the personal computer to the Internet of Things, meaning it couldn’t truly lock up the computing ecosystem as much as the government alleged.“Judge Jackson in the Microsoft case said, yeah, those things are happening, but not happening fast enough to deny you real market power in this PC and laptop-based market that the Justice Department is emphasizing,” Kovacic says.Still, he adds, a market niche can at some point become so small that it’s no longer significant in the eyes of antitrust law. “You can have a process of change that ultimately renders the market segment unimportant,” he says. “And the hard task of analysis for the judge is to say, has it already happened?”See More:
    المصدر: www.theverge.com
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    WWW.THEVERGE.COM
    Why one obscure app could help crumble Meta’s empire
    If the question, “Who is Meta’s biggest rival?” were on a Family Feud survey, TikTok would likely be the winning answer. In the Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust case against the Facebook and Instagram owner, the government’s response probably wouldn’t even make the top 10: a small blockchain-based platform called MeWe. MeWe looks a fair amount like Facebook at first glance, except that you make an account using the Frequency blockchain — which the company explains is a decentralized protocol that lets you move your social connections to other (mostly hypothetical at this point) apps that support Frequency. The company says 20 million users have joined, but when I make a MeWe account and log in, I scroll through my autopopulated feed and think, “Who are these people?” I search for a few of my Verge colleagues, figuring if anyone has tried this obscure app, it might be one of them, but I come up short. I try some public figures: Tim Cook? Jeff Bezos? Mark Zuckerberg? There are some accounts with these names, but it seems unlikely they’re the ones I have in mind.The claim that MeWe is a closer competitor to Facebook and Instagram than TikTok might be baffling if you’re not steeped in antitrust law or the specifics of the FTC’s complaint. Meta CEO Zuckerberg testified he hadn’t even heard of the app before this case was filed. But the FTC has spent the past three weeks laying out its logic. Using Meta’s own internal discussions about how it views itself and its competition, it says that Meta has historically, and to this day, competed in a market for connecting with friends and family online — and when it saw its dominance in that space threatened by the rise of Instagram and WhatsApp, it bought them to squash the competition.Whether Judge James Boasberg buys this could determine who wins the case — if the FTC can also show that Meta acted illegally through its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp to solidify its alleged monopoly power.Antitrust law is supposed to ensure fair competition, which usually means that people have options for a useful class of goods and services — what’s known as a relevant market. The FTC says that here, that market is “personal social networking services,” or PSNs: spaces where a core purpose is helping people connect with friends and family. While there are many online platforms that overlap with Meta’s services, the FTC argues that virtually none of them serve that market. If internet users want to find and hang out with people they know — as opposed to, say, watching influencers or making work connections — then it’s Mark Zuckerberg’s way or… in the government’s telling, Snapchat, BeReal, and MeWe. Beyond that core definition, PSNs have some other unique features and norms: The apps feature a social graph of users’ friends and family connections, as opposed to mapping users primarily based on their interests. Users can look up and find people they know in real life. And they come to the app to share personal updates with those people.Facebook and Instagram increasingly display videos and photos from influencers and celebrities, but the FTC argues personal social networking remains a core service. It used Instagram chief Adam Mosseri’s testimony to most clearly make this point. In that testimony as well as posts to his own Instagram account, Mosseri said that it’s still important for the app to connect users with their friends. The FTC argues that even if that use case is a smaller portion of what Meta’s apps do these days, it’s still a significant need users have that can virtually only be fulfilled by Facebook and Instagram. While someone might connect with people they know in real life on LinkedIn, they likely won’t primarily share personal updates there. And while they also could follow and interact with people they know on TikTok or YouTube, they’re more likely to passively watch videos from people they don’t.Meta says this is an entirely wrong way to think about it. Social media platforms compete for users’ time and attention, so whether a particular app is squarely aimed at so-called friends and family sharing is beside the point. Facebook and Instagram have evolved to show more content from people like influencers, shifting further from the use case the FTC says Meta has illegally dominated. The company has already landed some important points that could help its case, and it will get more time to push back on the agency’s framing when it calls its own witnesses in the coming weeks.But as the FTC’s case-in-chief continues into its fifth week, its argument for Meta’s dominance is becoming a lot clearer.Why do people use Facebook?When defining a market, each side is trying to answer a key question: why are people choosing one particular company’s product? A lot of goods and services compete with each other in some sense, but this doesn’t mean they serve the same niche. In the case of sodas, for example, “you could buy lemon-lime, but many people would never see that as a close substitute for buying Coke or Pepsi,” says George Washington Law professor and former FTC Chair Bill Kovacic. In the tech world, Netflix has claimed its biggest competitors are Fortnite and sleep — but those comparisons probably wouldn’t stand up in court.The FTC says that outside of Facebook and Instagram, only apps like Snapchat and MeWe can fulfill a users’ desire to broadcast personal updates with friends and family online. To make its case, it brought in a string of executives from other social media companies to explain why their apps can’t quite scratch the same itch for users. Strava’s former VP of connected partnerships Mateo Ortega testified that sure, users of the fitness-tracking social media app could share baby photos on the platform, but they probably wouldn’t unless it was in a running stroller. “It’s all about fitness, and while you can post other stuff, it just doesn’t seem as relevant,” he said. “You could buy lemon-lime, but many people would never see that as a close substitute for buying Coke or Pepsi”Pinterest’s former head of user growth Julia Roberts testified that users who come to Pinterest “expecting it to be like other social media apps … tend to be confused about how to use the product.” That’s because the app is so much not about connecting with other people that it works much differently from other social media platforms. Pinterest is more about finding things users are interested in, she said, so “following is not a big part of the Pinterest experience.”TikTok has a tab where users can watch videos from their friends — identified as people who mutually follow each other. But head of operations Adam Presser testified only about 1 percent of videos watched on the platform are there. The company doesn’t think of itself as competing with Meta’s apps for personal social networking, he testified. And even though side-by-side screenshots of TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts look identical, Presser said, “when you click out of this view for these other platforms, you would get to essentially what I think of as their core business,” which for Instagram, includes a feed and stories that often contain at least some content from family and friends.At times, Meta’s cross-examination of rival company executives showed the limits of apps’ similarities. When questioning Apple director of product marketing Ronak Shah, Meta sought to show that group chats in Apple’s messaging feature could serve as a social media feed for friends and family sharing. But Shah testified that feed would be limited to 32 people at most, and users can’t just look up each others’ profiles like they would on social platforms. Still, Meta pointed out, Apple’s messages app is listed under social media on its own app store.However, Meta also made important arguments about why the judge should question the FTC’s framing. It pointed out that some documents from TikTok and YouTube owner Google claiming their products are very different from Meta’s were submitted to foreign officials to try to avoid getting drafted into potentially frustrating regulations. It also pointed out when TikTok briefly went dark in the US ahead of a (now-aborted) ban, users flocked to Meta apps, showing consumers see it as a substitute on at least some level. That’s because, Meta argued, competition for users is really about winning their time and attention.Companies can “sometimes make mistakes. They misjudge who their users are”But X VP of product Keith Coleman testified it’s not that useful to think about competition this way. Instead, “it’s much more helpful to understand what people are trying to accomplish in their lives and to try to help them accomplish that.” Under former CEO Jack Dorsey, then-Twitter leaned into focusing on news and users’ interests, Coleman testified, because that’s why people were coming to the platform. Coleman was later surprised at how his own website characterized the product in its help center as a “service for friends, family, and coworkers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent messages.” “I can’t believe that’s on the website,” he said. “That’s pretty wacky.”This point was “a caution that not everything a company writes down or says is necessarily decisive in establishing what the boundary of a market is,” Kovacic said. Companies can “sometimes make mistakes. They misjudge who their users are.”There are real ramifications for internet users here. Going back to Netflix’s comparisons, if the streaming video service went down, some people would probably be happy to play a video game or get a few hours of shut-eye instead. But others would be frustrated that they couldn’t watch a movie, which is why it’s good that Hulu, HBO, and Amazon Prime Video also exist. The FTC’s argument isn’t that Meta owns the only social apps on the internet, it’s that the company faces little competition for a service many people specifically want — so the fact that you probably don’t know anyone using MeWe is sort of the point.How will the judge decide?Ultimately, Boasberg’s market definition — whether it’s Meta’s, the FTC’s, or his own — will come down to a few things: how Meta views itself, how competitors see it, and his own intuition, says Kovacic. ”Notice how much the FTC has been questioning Meta witnesses on the basis of its own internal documents,” he says. “Does the story in the courtroom match the story of your own internal documents?” So far, the documents have shown that Meta has clocked that at least some portion of users come to its products to connect with family and friends, but also that the rise of TikTok has had it looking over its shoulder. In September 2020, Meta told its board that Instagram revenue would be “meaningfully lower” than planned in the second half of the fiscal year because TikTok was drawing users’ attention. But other internal documents have shown Meta’s well aware that at different points in time, users have come to its apps to connect with family and friends, and worriedly took note of other apps entering that space. In a 2018 presentation, Meta found that the highest percentage of surveyed users said they come to Facebook, Instagram, and Snap to “see daily casual moments” and “see special moments.” By contrast, users came to Twitter’s feed for news and YouTube’s for entertainment. And even as Instagram expands into entertainment, the FTC notes that it still advertises its sign-up page as a place to “see photos and videos from your friends.”“Instagram will always need to focus on friends”In a 2018 email, Zuckerberg told Mosseri that “Instagram will always need to focus on friends.” And even though a lot has changed in the social media landscape since then, Mosseri testified that to this day on the app, “friends are an important part of the experience.” Even though users may share fewer of their own updates on Facebook and Instagram, Mosseri admitted that two friends talking in the comments of a public figure’s post counts as an interaction between friends — and one that Instagram actively tries to facilitate.Meta has argued that this special focus on friends and family sharing makes up a shrinking portion of its offerings as it works to compete with fierce rivals like TikTok. But the FTC says it’s still significant enough to monopolize. It’s a scenario that came up in another major tech monopolization case, Kovacic says: the late-1990s lawsuit US v. Microsoft. In that case, Microsoft argued the Justice Department was ignoring how computing would soon move beyond the personal computer to the Internet of Things, meaning it couldn’t truly lock up the computing ecosystem as much as the government alleged.“Judge Jackson in the Microsoft case said, yeah, those things are happening, but not happening fast enough to deny you real market power in this PC and laptop-based market that the Justice Department is emphasizing,” Kovacic says.Still, he adds, a market niche can at some point become so small that it’s no longer significant in the eyes of antitrust law. “You can have a process of change that ultimately renders the market segment unimportant,” he says. “And the hard task of analysis for the judge is to say, has it already happened?”See More:
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