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  • The Verge shared a link
    2025-06-15 07:00:09 - Translate -
    Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s AI hiring spree

    AI researchers have recently been asking themselves a version of the question, “Is that really Zuck?”As first reported by Bloomberg, the Meta CEO has been personally asking top AI talent to join his new “superintelligence” AI lab and reboot Llama. His recruiting process typically goes like this: a cold outreach via email or WhatsApp that cites the recruit’s work history and requests a 15-minute chat. Dozens of researchers have gotten these kinds of messages at Google alone. For those who do agree to hear his pitch, Zuckerberg highlights the latitude they’ll have to make risky bets, the scale of Meta’s products, and the money he’s prepared to invest in the infrastructure to support them. He makes clear that this new team will be empowered and sit with him at Meta’s headquarters, where I’m told the desks have already been rearranged for the incoming team.Most of the headlines so far have focused on the eye-popping compensation packages Zuckerberg is offering, some of which are well into the eight-figure range. As I’ve covered before, hiring the best AI researcher is like hiring a star basketball player: there are very few of them, and you have to pay up. Case in point: Zuckerberg basically just paid 14 Instagrams to hire away Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang. It’s easily the most expensive hire of all time, dwarfing the billions that Google spent to rehire Noam Shazeer and his core team from Character.AI. “Opportunities of this magnitude often come at a cost,” Wang wrote in his note to employees this week. “In this instance, that cost is my departure.”Zuckerberg’s recruiting spree is already starting to rattle his competitors. The day before his offer deadline for some senior OpenAI employees, Sam Altman dropped an essay proclaiming that “before anything else, we are a superintelligence research company.” And after Zuckerberg tried to hire DeepMind CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu, he was given a larger SVP title and now reports directly to Google CEO Sundar Pichai. I expect Wang to have the title of “chief AI officer” at Meta when the new lab is announced. Jack Rae, a principal researcher from DeepMind who has signed on, will lead pre-training. Meta certainly needs a reset. According to my sources, Llama has fallen so far behind that Meta’s product teams have recently discussed using AI models from other companies. Meta’s internal coding tool for engineers, however, is already using Claude. While Meta’s existing AI researchers have good reason to be looking over their shoulders, Zuckerberg’s billion investment in Scale is making many longtime employees, or Scaliens, quite wealthy. They were popping champagne in the office this morning. Then, Wang held his last all-hands meeting to say goodbye and cried. He didn’t mention what he would be doing at Meta. I expect his new team will be unveiled within the next few weeks after Zuckerberg gets a critical number of members to officially sign on. Tim Cook. Getty Images / The VergeApple’s AI problemApple is accustomed to being on top of the tech industry, and for good reason: the company has enjoyed a nearly unrivaled run of dominance. After spending time at Apple HQ this week for WWDC, I’m not sure that its leaders appreciate the meteorite that is heading their way. The hubris they display suggests they don’t understand how AI is fundamentally changing how people use and build software.Heading into the keynote on Monday, everyone knew not to expect the revamped Siri that had been promised the previous year. Apple, to its credit, acknowledged that it dropped the ball there, and it sounds like a large language model rebuild of Siri is very much underway and coming in 2026.The AI industry moves much faster than Apple’s release schedule, though. By the time Siri is perhaps good enough to keep pace, it will have to contend with the lock-in that OpenAI and others are building through their memory features. Apple and OpenAI are currently partners, but both companies want to ultimately control the interface for interacting with AI, which puts them on a collision course. Apple’s decision to let developers use its own, on-device foundational models for free in their apps sounds strategically smart, but unfortunately, the models look far from leading. Apple ran its own benchmarks, which aren’t impressive, and has confirmed a measly context window of 4,096 tokens. It’s also saying that the models will be updated alongside its operating systems — a snail’s pace compared to how quickly AI companies move. I’d be surprised if any serious developers use these Apple models, although I can see them being helpful to indie devs who are just getting started and don’t want to spend on the leading cloud models. I don’t think most people care about the privacy angle that Apple is claiming as a differentiator; they are already sharing their darkest secrets with ChatGPT and other assistants. Some of the new Apple Intelligence features I demoed this week were impressive, such as live language translation for calls. Mostly, I came away with the impression that the company is heavily leaning on its ChatGPT partnership as a stopgap until Apple Intelligence and Siri are both where they need to be. AI probably isn’t a near-term risk to Apple’s business. No one has shipped anything close to the contextually aware Siri that was demoed at last year’s WWDC. People will continue to buy Apple hardware for a long time, even after Sam Altman and Jony Ive announce their first AI device for ChatGPT next year. AR glasses aren’t going mainstream anytime soon either, although we can expect to see more eyewear from Meta, Google, and Snap over the coming year. In aggregate, these AI-powered devices could begin to siphon away engagement from the iPhone, but I don’t see people fully replacing their smartphones for a long time. The bigger question after this week is whether Apple has what it takes to rise to the occasion and culturally reset itself for the AI era. I would have loved to hear Tim Cook address this issue directly, but the only interview he did for WWDC was a cover story in Variety about the company’s new F1 movie.ElsewhereAI agents are coming. I recently caught up with Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi ahead of his company’s annual developer conference this week in San Francisco. Given Databricks’ position, he has a unique, bird’s-eye view of where things are headed for AI. He doesn’t envision a near-term future where AI agents completely automate real-world tasks, but he does predict a wave of startups over the next year that will come close to completing actions in areas such as travel booking. He thinks humans will needto approve what an agent does before it goes off and completes a task. “We have most of the airplanes flying automated, and we still want pilots in there.”Buyouts are the new normal at Google. That much is clear after this week’s rollout of the “voluntary exit program” in core engineering, the Search organization, and some other divisions. In his internal memo, Search SVP Nick Fox was clear that management thinks buyouts have been successful in other parts of the company that have tried them. In a separate memo I saw, engineering exec Jen Fitzpatrick called the buyouts an “opportunity to create internal mobility and fresh growth opportunities.” Google appears to be attempting a cultural reset, which will be a challenging task for a company of its size. We’ll see if it can pull it off. Evan Spiegel wants help with AR glasses. I doubt that his announcement that consumer glasses are coming next year was solely aimed at AR developers. Telegraphing the plan and announcing that Snap has spent billion on hardware to date feels more aimed at potential partners that want to make a bigger glasses play, such as Google. A strategic investment could help insulate Snap from the pain of the stock market. A full acquisition may not be off the table, either. When he was recently asked if he’d be open to a sale, Spiegel didn’t shut it down like he always has, but instead said he’d “consider anything” that helps the company “create the next computing platform.”Link listMore to click on:If you haven’t already, don’t forget to subscribe to The Verge, which includes unlimited access to Command Line and all of our reporting.As always, I welcome your feedback, especially if you’re an AI researcher fielding a juicy job offer. You can respond here or ping me securely on Signal.Thanks for subscribing.See More:
    #inside #mark #zuckerbergs #hiring #spree
    Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s AI hiring spree
    AI researchers have recently been asking themselves a version of the question, “Is that really Zuck?”As first reported by Bloomberg, the Meta CEO has been personally asking top AI talent to join his new “superintelligence” AI lab and reboot Llama. His recruiting process typically goes like this: a cold outreach via email or WhatsApp that cites the recruit’s work history and requests a 15-minute chat. Dozens of researchers have gotten these kinds of messages at Google alone. For those who do agree to hear his pitch, Zuckerberg highlights the latitude they’ll have to make risky bets, the scale of Meta’s products, and the money he’s prepared to invest in the infrastructure to support them. He makes clear that this new team will be empowered and sit with him at Meta’s headquarters, where I’m told the desks have already been rearranged for the incoming team.Most of the headlines so far have focused on the eye-popping compensation packages Zuckerberg is offering, some of which are well into the eight-figure range. As I’ve covered before, hiring the best AI researcher is like hiring a star basketball player: there are very few of them, and you have to pay up. Case in point: Zuckerberg basically just paid 14 Instagrams to hire away Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang. It’s easily the most expensive hire of all time, dwarfing the billions that Google spent to rehire Noam Shazeer and his core team from Character.AI. “Opportunities of this magnitude often come at a cost,” Wang wrote in his note to employees this week. “In this instance, that cost is my departure.”Zuckerberg’s recruiting spree is already starting to rattle his competitors. The day before his offer deadline for some senior OpenAI employees, Sam Altman dropped an essay proclaiming that “before anything else, we are a superintelligence research company.” And after Zuckerberg tried to hire DeepMind CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu, he was given a larger SVP title and now reports directly to Google CEO Sundar Pichai. I expect Wang to have the title of “chief AI officer” at Meta when the new lab is announced. Jack Rae, a principal researcher from DeepMind who has signed on, will lead pre-training. Meta certainly needs a reset. According to my sources, Llama has fallen so far behind that Meta’s product teams have recently discussed using AI models from other companies. Meta’s internal coding tool for engineers, however, is already using Claude. While Meta’s existing AI researchers have good reason to be looking over their shoulders, Zuckerberg’s billion investment in Scale is making many longtime employees, or Scaliens, quite wealthy. They were popping champagne in the office this morning. Then, Wang held his last all-hands meeting to say goodbye and cried. He didn’t mention what he would be doing at Meta. I expect his new team will be unveiled within the next few weeks after Zuckerberg gets a critical number of members to officially sign on. Tim Cook. Getty Images / The VergeApple’s AI problemApple is accustomed to being on top of the tech industry, and for good reason: the company has enjoyed a nearly unrivaled run of dominance. After spending time at Apple HQ this week for WWDC, I’m not sure that its leaders appreciate the meteorite that is heading their way. The hubris they display suggests they don’t understand how AI is fundamentally changing how people use and build software.Heading into the keynote on Monday, everyone knew not to expect the revamped Siri that had been promised the previous year. Apple, to its credit, acknowledged that it dropped the ball there, and it sounds like a large language model rebuild of Siri is very much underway and coming in 2026.The AI industry moves much faster than Apple’s release schedule, though. By the time Siri is perhaps good enough to keep pace, it will have to contend with the lock-in that OpenAI and others are building through their memory features. Apple and OpenAI are currently partners, but both companies want to ultimately control the interface for interacting with AI, which puts them on a collision course. Apple’s decision to let developers use its own, on-device foundational models for free in their apps sounds strategically smart, but unfortunately, the models look far from leading. Apple ran its own benchmarks, which aren’t impressive, and has confirmed a measly context window of 4,096 tokens. It’s also saying that the models will be updated alongside its operating systems — a snail’s pace compared to how quickly AI companies move. I’d be surprised if any serious developers use these Apple models, although I can see them being helpful to indie devs who are just getting started and don’t want to spend on the leading cloud models. I don’t think most people care about the privacy angle that Apple is claiming as a differentiator; they are already sharing their darkest secrets with ChatGPT and other assistants. Some of the new Apple Intelligence features I demoed this week were impressive, such as live language translation for calls. Mostly, I came away with the impression that the company is heavily leaning on its ChatGPT partnership as a stopgap until Apple Intelligence and Siri are both where they need to be. AI probably isn’t a near-term risk to Apple’s business. No one has shipped anything close to the contextually aware Siri that was demoed at last year’s WWDC. People will continue to buy Apple hardware for a long time, even after Sam Altman and Jony Ive announce their first AI device for ChatGPT next year. AR glasses aren’t going mainstream anytime soon either, although we can expect to see more eyewear from Meta, Google, and Snap over the coming year. In aggregate, these AI-powered devices could begin to siphon away engagement from the iPhone, but I don’t see people fully replacing their smartphones for a long time. The bigger question after this week is whether Apple has what it takes to rise to the occasion and culturally reset itself for the AI era. I would have loved to hear Tim Cook address this issue directly, but the only interview he did for WWDC was a cover story in Variety about the company’s new F1 movie.ElsewhereAI agents are coming. I recently caught up with Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi ahead of his company’s annual developer conference this week in San Francisco. Given Databricks’ position, he has a unique, bird’s-eye view of where things are headed for AI. He doesn’t envision a near-term future where AI agents completely automate real-world tasks, but he does predict a wave of startups over the next year that will come close to completing actions in areas such as travel booking. He thinks humans will needto approve what an agent does before it goes off and completes a task. “We have most of the airplanes flying automated, and we still want pilots in there.”Buyouts are the new normal at Google. That much is clear after this week’s rollout of the “voluntary exit program” in core engineering, the Search organization, and some other divisions. In his internal memo, Search SVP Nick Fox was clear that management thinks buyouts have been successful in other parts of the company that have tried them. In a separate memo I saw, engineering exec Jen Fitzpatrick called the buyouts an “opportunity to create internal mobility and fresh growth opportunities.” Google appears to be attempting a cultural reset, which will be a challenging task for a company of its size. We’ll see if it can pull it off. Evan Spiegel wants help with AR glasses. I doubt that his announcement that consumer glasses are coming next year was solely aimed at AR developers. Telegraphing the plan and announcing that Snap has spent billion on hardware to date feels more aimed at potential partners that want to make a bigger glasses play, such as Google. A strategic investment could help insulate Snap from the pain of the stock market. A full acquisition may not be off the table, either. When he was recently asked if he’d be open to a sale, Spiegel didn’t shut it down like he always has, but instead said he’d “consider anything” that helps the company “create the next computing platform.”Link listMore to click on:If you haven’t already, don’t forget to subscribe to The Verge, which includes unlimited access to Command Line and all of our reporting.As always, I welcome your feedback, especially if you’re an AI researcher fielding a juicy job offer. You can respond here or ping me securely on Signal.Thanks for subscribing.See More: #inside #mark #zuckerbergs #hiring #spree
    WWW.THEVERGE.COM
    Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s AI hiring spree
    AI researchers have recently been asking themselves a version of the question, “Is that really Zuck?”As first reported by Bloomberg, the Meta CEO has been personally asking top AI talent to join his new “superintelligence” AI lab and reboot Llama. His recruiting process typically goes like this: a cold outreach via email or WhatsApp that cites the recruit’s work history and requests a 15-minute chat. Dozens of researchers have gotten these kinds of messages at Google alone. For those who do agree to hear his pitch (amazingly, not all of them do), Zuckerberg highlights the latitude they’ll have to make risky bets, the scale of Meta’s products, and the money he’s prepared to invest in the infrastructure to support them. He makes clear that this new team will be empowered and sit with him at Meta’s headquarters, where I’m told the desks have already been rearranged for the incoming team.Most of the headlines so far have focused on the eye-popping compensation packages Zuckerberg is offering, some of which are well into the eight-figure range. As I’ve covered before, hiring the best AI researcher is like hiring a star basketball player: there are very few of them, and you have to pay up. Case in point: Zuckerberg basically just paid 14 Instagrams to hire away Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang. It’s easily the most expensive hire of all time, dwarfing the billions that Google spent to rehire Noam Shazeer and his core team from Character.AI (a deal Zuckerberg passed on). “Opportunities of this magnitude often come at a cost,” Wang wrote in his note to employees this week. “In this instance, that cost is my departure.”Zuckerberg’s recruiting spree is already starting to rattle his competitors. The day before his offer deadline for some senior OpenAI employees, Sam Altman dropped an essay proclaiming that “before anything else, we are a superintelligence research company.” And after Zuckerberg tried to hire DeepMind CTO Koray Kavukcuoglu, he was given a larger SVP title and now reports directly to Google CEO Sundar Pichai. I expect Wang to have the title of “chief AI officer” at Meta when the new lab is announced. Jack Rae, a principal researcher from DeepMind who has signed on, will lead pre-training. Meta certainly needs a reset. According to my sources, Llama has fallen so far behind that Meta’s product teams have recently discussed using AI models from other companies (although that is highly unlikely to happen). Meta’s internal coding tool for engineers, however, is already using Claude. While Meta’s existing AI researchers have good reason to be looking over their shoulders, Zuckerberg’s $14.3 billion investment in Scale is making many longtime employees, or Scaliens, quite wealthy. They were popping champagne in the office this morning. Then, Wang held his last all-hands meeting to say goodbye and cried. He didn’t mention what he would be doing at Meta. I expect his new team will be unveiled within the next few weeks after Zuckerberg gets a critical number of members to officially sign on. Tim Cook. Getty Images / The VergeApple’s AI problemApple is accustomed to being on top of the tech industry, and for good reason: the company has enjoyed a nearly unrivaled run of dominance. After spending time at Apple HQ this week for WWDC, I’m not sure that its leaders appreciate the meteorite that is heading their way. The hubris they display suggests they don’t understand how AI is fundamentally changing how people use and build software.Heading into the keynote on Monday, everyone knew not to expect the revamped Siri that had been promised the previous year. Apple, to its credit, acknowledged that it dropped the ball there, and it sounds like a large language model rebuild of Siri is very much underway and coming in 2026.The AI industry moves much faster than Apple’s release schedule, though. By the time Siri is perhaps good enough to keep pace, it will have to contend with the lock-in that OpenAI and others are building through their memory features. Apple and OpenAI are currently partners, but both companies want to ultimately control the interface for interacting with AI, which puts them on a collision course. Apple’s decision to let developers use its own, on-device foundational models for free in their apps sounds strategically smart, but unfortunately, the models look far from leading. Apple ran its own benchmarks, which aren’t impressive, and has confirmed a measly context window of 4,096 tokens. It’s also saying that the models will be updated alongside its operating systems — a snail’s pace compared to how quickly AI companies move. I’d be surprised if any serious developers use these Apple models, although I can see them being helpful to indie devs who are just getting started and don’t want to spend on the leading cloud models. I don’t think most people care about the privacy angle that Apple is claiming as a differentiator; they are already sharing their darkest secrets with ChatGPT and other assistants. Some of the new Apple Intelligence features I demoed this week were impressive, such as live language translation for calls. Mostly, I came away with the impression that the company is heavily leaning on its ChatGPT partnership as a stopgap until Apple Intelligence and Siri are both where they need to be. AI probably isn’t a near-term risk to Apple’s business. No one has shipped anything close to the contextually aware Siri that was demoed at last year’s WWDC. People will continue to buy Apple hardware for a long time, even after Sam Altman and Jony Ive announce their first AI device for ChatGPT next year. AR glasses aren’t going mainstream anytime soon either, although we can expect to see more eyewear from Meta, Google, and Snap over the coming year. In aggregate, these AI-powered devices could begin to siphon away engagement from the iPhone, but I don’t see people fully replacing their smartphones for a long time. The bigger question after this week is whether Apple has what it takes to rise to the occasion and culturally reset itself for the AI era. I would have loved to hear Tim Cook address this issue directly, but the only interview he did for WWDC was a cover story in Variety about the company’s new F1 movie.ElsewhereAI agents are coming. I recently caught up with Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi ahead of his company’s annual developer conference this week in San Francisco. Given Databricks’ position, he has a unique, bird’s-eye view of where things are headed for AI. He doesn’t envision a near-term future where AI agents completely automate real-world tasks, but he does predict a wave of startups over the next year that will come close to completing actions in areas such as travel booking. He thinks humans will need (and want) to approve what an agent does before it goes off and completes a task. “We have most of the airplanes flying automated, and we still want pilots in there.”Buyouts are the new normal at Google. That much is clear after this week’s rollout of the “voluntary exit program” in core engineering, the Search organization, and some other divisions. In his internal memo, Search SVP Nick Fox was clear that management thinks buyouts have been successful in other parts of the company that have tried them. In a separate memo I saw, engineering exec Jen Fitzpatrick called the buyouts an “opportunity to create internal mobility and fresh growth opportunities.” Google appears to be attempting a cultural reset, which will be a challenging task for a company of its size. We’ll see if it can pull it off. Evan Spiegel wants help with AR glasses. I doubt that his announcement that consumer glasses are coming next year was solely aimed at AR developers. Telegraphing the plan and announcing that Snap has spent $3 billion on hardware to date feels more aimed at potential partners that want to make a bigger glasses play, such as Google. A strategic investment could help insulate Snap from the pain of the stock market. A full acquisition may not be off the table, either. When he was recently asked if he’d be open to a sale, Spiegel didn’t shut it down like he always has, but instead said he’d “consider anything” that helps the company “create the next computing platform.”Link listMore to click on:If you haven’t already, don’t forget to subscribe to The Verge, which includes unlimited access to Command Line and all of our reporting.As always, I welcome your feedback, especially if you’re an AI researcher fielding a juicy job offer. You can respond here or ping me securely on Signal.Thanks for subscribing.See More:
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  • The Verge shared a link
    2025-05-13 13:47:29 - Translate -
    #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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#view #essentially #business #includes #stories #often #contain #least #friendsat #times #crossexamination #showed #limits #similaritieswhen #questioning #apple #director #marketing #ronak #shah #sought #group #chats #apples #messaging #sharingbut #limited #others #profiles #platformsstill #pointed #messages #listed #under #storehowever #made #arguments #should #framingit #documents #google #claiming #products #very #different #submitted #foreign #officials #avoid #getting #drafted #potentially #frustrating #regulationsit #briefly #went #dark #ahead #nowaborted #ban #flocked #showing #consumers #levelthats #argued #really #attentioncompanies #sometimes #mistakesthey #misjudge #arebut #keith #coleman #wayinstead #helpful #understand #accomplish #lives #jack #dorsey #thentwitter #leaned #focusing #news #interests #platformcoleman #later #surprised #website #characterized #center #service #coworkers #communicate #stay #exchange #quick #frequent #believe #saidthats #pretty #wackythis #caution #everything #writes #down #necessarily #decisive #establishing #boundary #kovacic #saidcompanies #arethere #ramifications #heregoing #netflixs #streaming #video #happy #play #game #hours #shuteye #insteadbut #frustrated #couldnt #movie #good #hulu #hbo #amazon #prime #existthe #isnt #owns #faces #little #specifically #fact #dont #sort #pointhow #decideultimately #boasbergs #intuition #kovacicnotice #been #basis #saysdoes #story #courtroom #match #far #shown #clocked #had #looking #over #shoulderin #september #told #board #revenue #meaningfully #lower #planned #second #half #fiscal #year #drawing #attentionbut #aware #worriedly #took #note #entering #spacein #presentation #found #highest #percentage #surveyed #snap #daily #casual #moments #special #contrast #came #twitters #youtubes #entertainmentand #expands #entertainment #notes #advertises #signup #page #place #friendsinstagram #always #focus #friendsin #email #changed #landscape #since #experience #may #fewer #admitted #two #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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