It’s damned hard to prove an antitrust case: so often, the prosecution has to prove that the company intended to crush competition, and/or that they raised prices or reduced quality because they knew they didn’t have to fear competitors.
It’s a lot easier to prove what a corporation did than it is to prove why they did it. What am I, a mind-reader? But imagine for a second that the corporation in the dock is a global multinational. Now, imagine that the majority of the voting shares in that company are held by one man, who has served as the company’s CEO since the day he founded it, personally calling every important shot in the company’s history.
Now imagine that this founder/CEO, this accused monopolist, was an incorrigible blabbermouth, who communicated with his underlings almost exclusively in writing, and thus did he commit to immortal digital storage a stream – a torrent – of memos in which he explicitly confessed his guilt.
Ladies and gentlepersons, I give you Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta (nee Facebook), an accused monopolist who cannot keep his big dumb fucking mouth shut.
For anyone, like me, confused by the title: no verdict has been reached, and the trial expected to last for about seven more weeks.
Wouldn’t it be fun if one day a year every billionaire had to go without bodyguards ?
Do you think the rest of the year they would act differently?
I mean it’s nice that he had a bad day, but ain’t shit gonna happen other than the legal fees.
Why not? Can’t it lead to Meta breakup?
Trump’s first administration filed the lawsuit that led to the court determination that Google held a search monopoly. The result of that is the DOJ filed a proposal that Google sell chrome web browser to another entity. Google has been fighting this proposal tooth and nail.
So the answer is, I’ll believe Meta gets broken up when I see it.
We’re in post law society, I can’t even believe the trump admin is going after tech giants. So i believe anything is possible here. I can’t imagine anything the admin does will be good for society so maybe its safe to assume they will be broken up so elon can buy a chunk?
I can’t even believe the trump admin is going after tech giants.
I share the disbelief. I think it is mostly a power play against not just Google, but all tech giants, which must be watching this closely, given most of them operate in a similarly anticompetitive manner: kiss the ring or else. The Trump administration could give Google reprieve in exchange for axing DEI further and helping push their political agenda.
I can’t imagine anything the admin does will be good for society so maybe its safe to assume they will be broken up so elon can buy a chunk?
I think so too: if Google doesn’t satisfy Trump and his administration, parts of it will be forcibly sold as private equity, outside of shareholder scrutiny and beyond the reach of the SEC. Such a private company would be easier to control than a publicly traded one.
Yea i guess the most simple explanation, that is most coherent with the rest of the administration’s actions, is that it’s just a mob style shake down of every major economic player. Pure extortion as the japanese said.
But ya its funny to see the SEC and DOJ neutered and then actually used against big tech. Ironic and poetic, and fucking stupid. It really burns at the senses, and creates confusion.
Tech giants welcomed Trump because they thought he would enable two things. A roll-back of regulations, and to increase profits. The thing is, the monkey wrench in this situation is twofold. The first problem is Elon Musk being placed in a position of power that enables him to detrimentally effect the profits and regulations of these industries to benefit his companies first and foremost while also being detrimental to these other tech companies. We see that a lot with the data he’s been stealing from all kinds of government agencies under the guise of saving the government money.
This means that even regulations that are removed that pave the way for these companies to enact policy or even just products to enrich themselves are hindered by Musk being a direct competitor to a lot of them. Facebook/Instagram vs Twitter, Tesla vs Ford, SpaceX vs Blue origin.
The second problem is the tariff situation. It cuts off a majority of tech companies from the cheap manufacture of components, devices, and even just consumer electronics that a lot of tech companies rely on in order to get their products into the hands of users so they can siphon up user data.
A third problem is that Musk has his hands in so much stuff that he’s pressuring the government to place his companies first in the running for. SpaceX and Tesla especially for things like bullet proof vehicles (where previously the government had contracts with other automotive manufacturers), and SpaceX being used for missions that NASA might have previously handled using Boeing products etc.
All these tech companies went to Washington DC to “Kiss the Ring” with the intention not just of avoiding a lot of legislation being leveled at them by previous administrations, but also in the hopes that they could position themselves as Musk had. For further government contracts. Because long after Trump is dead and buried, the contracts would be lucrative.
But that assumes they survive all the upheaval his administration is causing (and not just survive it, but come out largely economically and financially unharmed).
Anything may be possible, but the market has to survive in order for these companies to remain supreme.
Absolutely. As an investor and enjoyer of US markets and economy, I am truly terrified at the ramifications of all this. No safe harbors left to hide in and it appears to be hit the economy with a wrecking ball, and funnel the remaining funds to elon. I’m not so interested in US markets anymore and i can imagine this will have a lasting effect on investor confidence and companies bottom line.
What confuses me is if you steal all the money and destroy the stock market and USD in the process, what do you even do with the stolen wealth?
Buy things up in the fallout. The power vacuum the collapse will create will be ripe for anyone who comes out financially ahead in such a situation.
Yea time to fill up the garage with portable generators and nintendo switch
None of which affects his bottom line regardless as the company itself absorbs the loss. He can run his mouth and it’s 10k jobs that get cut and everyone else works that much harder to keep up.
People that wield so much power without consequence or control is everything that is wrong with everything.
Please, please, make them sell WhatsApp.
Signal: “I’m right over here, guys! Just click on me, install me, tell your friends. Hellooo!”
I’d love to have people move over to other apps. But here in Germany it’s nearly impossible to have a messenger group on any other app than WhatsApp. Everybody is on there. For every other app there will be someone not having it installed. It doesn’t matter if 80% are on Signal, 80% in Threema and 80% on Telegram. 100% are on Whatsapp and that’s what the group will be using.
And I’d argue the same applies to the iMessage vs RCS (or actual non-SMS messengers).
Most normies would most likely not switch as they could care less about their data.That’s not been my experience at all (also in Germany). Signal is super popular, especially with younger people (under 40). I don’t have a Whatsapp account and it’s super rare for it to be an issue.
Molly is another signal app but supposedly more private (no google push notifications)
I suggest Matrix/Xmpp over any of it, but good luck getting anyone’s lazy friends to register to use anything. Signal and similar messengers have easier onboarding.
To a non US company please.
The only crime he committed was not bribing the Trump administration enough to stay off the anti-trust radar. I hope they burn it all to the ground.
Are you implying that he bribed the previous administrations, as nothing happened until now?
Well, FOIA requests revealed Facebook was extremely cooperative with both enacting government censorship requests, and keeping them secret, when those same censorship requests would have been utterly illegal if they were an official order, so…
Some deal like “You give us control over information and we leave your monopoly alone”, even unspoken, seems to be the gist of it.
I’m not implying anything. I’m outright saying that the US government is corrupt enough to take kickbacks by corporations for political favors. I’m also saying Zuck didn’t bribe Trump’s admin enough (i.e. donations to his inaugural fund) to get away with their bullshit.
The initial suit was brought in December 2020. These things don’t happen over night.
I’d say the crime he committed was thinking Trump would keep his promise even after bribing him.
How anyone can trust this motherfucker is beyond me.
More like Facebook worked overtime to tip the 2020 election towards Biden and Trump is still mad about it.
Trump declared moral bankruptcy decades ago.
Trump famously likes to fuck his “friends’” wives and make them listen when he calls the wife and reveals it.
Don’t propagate his lies, there is no evidence that ever happened. Being that chud is the definition of unfuckable other than his money, and his ‘friends’ are also rich, there is close to 0 chance.
Honestly I doubt he’s even capable of active sex.
Yes, all sex he has is transactional. He’s not seducing anyone.
He was frat boy passable 60 years ago, and even then he wasn’t fucking anyone’s wives without cash crossing palms.
There’s still time to bribe the old man.
Zuck emailed Facebook execs, writing:
[Instagram’s growth is] really scary and why we might want to consider paying a lot of money for this.
Wait…I haven’t been following the story. Why is him buying Instagram a bad thing legally?
If you buy all the competition, you can set the price/rules.
Buying your competitors is a pretty monopolistic practice
You can’t buy a company with the intent to stifle competition.
They tried to compete with insta and failed, and he was concerned with insta’s potential to create features that compete with fb.
He then said the plan was to invest as little as possible in insta and only add features if competition sprouted up.
That makes sense.
Other than the fact that it happens all the time and nothing happens because, as OP mentioned, most people aren’t dumb enough to put it in writing
Lmao
What’s even funnier is that he’ll pay a relatively insignificant fine, and be able to continue and profit from the monopoly.
Corporate dictatorships masquerading as “democracy” is FUN!
Blessed be the profit margins. May the lord open.
It’s very hard to actually get a company broken up and I can’t remember ever seeing it happen. But when your antitrust case is judged against you, they don’t just charge you a fine and say “on your way now.”
Yeah somehow Microsoft dodged it in 2001 which is pretty mind-boggling because they were supreme at that point
Yeah office should have been split and MSN too. But we have had oligarchs calling the shot for eons.
i only know of this because I did an internship at AT&T https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
Yeah, Ma Bell breaking up into the Baby Bells is the only real example I can think of, and even they came back together later (though, by then, there was enough diversity in the market that they couldn’t reclaim the level of market dominance they once had)
The ATT orientation video about that is hilarious. It shows how Ma Bell was broken up, and then it just circles back around to it coming back together. On a map, with arrows lol
Proof that rich does not mean smart
You love to see it
He’s smart, but not wise. When you don’t know everything and don’t know what you don’t know, you act carefully. When it comes to the law, you should be extra careful and he should have had attorneys that advised him again putting this shit in writing.
I mean, every time we hire a new manager (not high level mind you) we tell them that whatever they communicate digitally, they better be comfortable with it being read in court.
Billionaires really have fuck you level of money. They just don’t care to think at all, and they’re okay with that. Gross.
Lol this is the typical takeaway. A better result would be to not engage in illegal practices and then it doesn’t matter if you put it in writing, but that’s not how you become a billionaire.
I’m with you. For the record, I was not advising people to act unethically, just surprised he wasn’t better at it.
Only way this would matter is if they were forced to sell or spin off Instagram and Whatsapp.
It would be very strange at this point to not see him be forced to spin them off. I mean, this is the trump admin. Anything is possible, but this is egregious (and also it would benefit musk if he was forced to do so)
Truly one of the greatest cover images of all time
…did they lose already?
