Meta's Big Antitrust Trial

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Amina Srna: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Amina Srna, a producer for The Brian Lehrer Show, filling in for Brian today. Good morning, everyone. Coming up on today's show, it's a health and climate doubleheader. First, we'll talk to Julie Rovner from KFF Health News. She's been following Health Secretary RFK Jr.'s so-called Make America Healthy Again mentor. He says his goal is to fight chronic disease and promote a healthy diet, but many health experts see a contradiction there since the health department has been cutting thousands of jobs where employees were working on chronic diseases.

Plus, for the climate portion of our Health and Climate Tuesday series, we'll hear about how the Trump administration has cut $300 million in FEMA funding for climate resiliency programs here in the city. Remember the brand new climate change Superfund Act? Advocates called it the Make Polluters Pay bill. Governor Hochul just signed it into law last year. The Trump administration has issued an executive order targeting it. We'll wrap today's show with travel advice for green card and other visa holders who might be worried about interactions or even arrests at the border. My guest is the legal advisor to CUNY's free immigration law service program.

First, Meta, the company formerly known as Facebook, could be split into two or more. Yesterday at a court in D.C., the US Federal Trade Commission kicked off its antitrust trial targeting Meta's years-old purchases of the social media app Instagram and the messaging app WhatsApp. The FTC is accusing Meta of creating a monopoly that ends stifling competition by making those purchases. The government wants Meta to spin off those services into separate companies, a move that would amount to the largest corporate breakup since the AT&T telephone monopoly was forced to split in the '80s.

Meta denied the allegations in court yesterday. In their opening statement, they said they face plenty of competition from companies like TikTok and others. All of this comes as Meta's CEO Mark Zuckerberg has spent months trying to curry favor with President Donald Trump. Will Trump's populist FTC break up big Meta, or will Trump sweep in at the last minute and strike a deal with Zuckerberg? Oh, and what does this mean for all of the 3.5 billion people around the world who use Meta's products, often multiple times per day?

Joining us now is Cristiano Lima-Strong, associate editor at Tech Policy Press. It's a nonprofit news site that says it covers the "intersection of technology and democracy". Welcome to WNYC, Cristiano.

Cristiano Lima-Strong: Thanks so much for having me.

Amina Srna: Listeners, we can take some of your questions or comments about this case if you happen to be following it at 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. Wondering if there are any Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp users out there listening? What has your experience been like on those platforms over the years? Anyone recently decide to move to another platform, or do you feel that they're so dominant in your social circles that you have to stay? Share your thoughts at 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. You can also text that number.

Cristiano, yesterday was day one of what's expected to be an eight-week trial. Both sides gave opening statements, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg testified. Let's start with the government's side. What is the FTC arguing?

Cristiano Lima-Strong: Sure. The Federal Trade Commission is arguing that Facebook, now known as Meta, has a monopoly over social media and what it calls, in particular, personal social networking devices. This being services online where people can connect with friends and family members, and acquaintances. That part of how it entrenched this monopoly was by acquiring Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 and that these acquisitions were basically a way to instead of competing with two companies that were on the up and up that it sought to acquire them so it would not have to deal with those potential competitive threats on the market.

Amina Srna: The FTC previewed some of the internal documents it's obtained from Meta, which give a good preview of how they think they'll win the case. Yesterday, they mostly focused on the acquisition of Instagram, as you said back in 2012, for about $1 billion. Are you familiar with some of the documents that the FTC brought forward yesterday? What stood out to you?

Cristiano Lima-Strong: Yes, absolutely. Some of what the agency has brought to bear in this case is to try to flesh out how executives at then Facebook were thinking about these nascent competitors in the market and what threat it could potentially pose to their bottom line. We've seen the agency both yesterday and in some of the legal jousting prior in the lead up to this trial present internal communications where executives, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg, talk about potentially seeing a real threat in these competitors and worrying about if they were to reach the scale that Facebook had at the time what it could mean for the company.

They're really trying to establish that part of the reason, and one of the driving reasons that the company acquired Instagram and WhatsApp was to head off the rise of these companies and to protect what they say was a dominant position in this market.

Amina Srna: Onto Meta's side, can you break down the company's opening argument? My understanding is that they were focused on competitors saying, "Look at TikTok, it's doing great."

Cristiano Lima-Strong: Exactly. What Meta has tried to do is to lay out that its products are competing on much larger playing fields than the agency has alleged. The FTC is alleging that there is a distinct market, as I alluded to in this idea of personal social networking, so very much connections-oriented people you know, whereas Meta has argued that it's operating in a larger pool of people vying for your attention online. It says it is competing with the YouTubes of the world, the TikToks of the world. Whereas, what the FTC would tell you is that they operate differently.

Something that the agency has said is that on YouTube and on TikTok, the experience is very different. It's more passive consumption of content. You're scrolling videos, you're watching what other people have posted, but you're not necessarily using it to map out this social network, which is what they say is Facebook-Meta's bread and butter and where it has established this dominance. Facebook says, "No, no, no, we are very much in direct competition with these other companies."

Amina Srna: As you mentioned earlier, these acquisitions were made more than a decade ago. Doesn't the FTC have the responsibility to greenlight mergers and acquisitions of this scale to some extent? Can you explain that a little bit further and what that means in the context of this case?

Cristiano Lima-Strong: Sure. That's definitely a point of contention here. The FTC does not directly approve, so to say, mergers and acquisitions. It does review them, and it decides whether there is an enforcement action to take. Back in 2012 and 2014, the FTC made public the fact that it had looked into these acquisitions, and it basically signaled that it was going to stand down. Now, the agency did say at the time, and particularly in the case of Instagram, "We reserve the right to challenge these down the line if we determine that it's in the public interest."

The court has dealt with this issue as well in some of the lead-up to the trial and basically dispensed with the notion that Meta has argued that because the FTC did not challenge them at the time, that these cases shouldn't be coming out now. The court has affirmed that the FTC does have a right to bring these cases. That's part of why we got to the point where we're at a trial now.

Amina Srna: Antitrust policy is far more complex than I can explain, but often at its core, especially when we're talking about tech companies, the core focus is on what's called, I think, technically, the consumer welfare standard, meaning if it's good for consumers, then it can't really be that bad, and there's no point in breaking up big companies. That is far too simple of an explanation, but does that come into play in this case at all?

Cristiano Lima-Strong: Yes, absolutely. It's highly relevant. Historically, as you've alluded to, this idea of the consumer welfare standard has been measured in terms of prices. A lot of times when the government has sought to show that a company has established a monopoly, they've said, "Well, this company has such a dominant position that it can raise prices on consumers and they can't go anywhere, they can't switch to alternatives because it is a monopoly."

Now, of course, Meta's services, Facebook, these are primarily free services. This is testing novel theories about how you map some of those antitrust precedents onto the digital landscape when so much of the web is open. Part of how this case is going to deal with that and how the government plans to approach this is by saying that Meta, by acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp, was able to degrade the quality of those services and so basically make them maybe weaker for privacy, make the products worse, and still not have users flee because it had a monopoly in this space. That there were no real competitors for people to turn to.

Another part of it is that Instagram and WhatsApp, they could have been these competitors had those acquisitions not gone through.

Amina Srna: For listeners scratching their heads right now, they might be saying, "Wait, WhatsApp isn't really a social media platform, is it?" I know you've been talking about personal networking devices. This is a category of its own, but why is that acquisition of WhatsApp part of this trial?

Cristiano Lima-Strong: WhatsApp, after Facebook acquired it in 2014, it's primarily a messaging service, but it's something that the company has really sought to integrate with its services and to also offer as an alternative to Facebook Messenger. The idea here is that all of this helps the company entrench its position. It is able to better get you to sign up for its other services because it has a foothold in messaging.

WhatsApp, in particular, has been very key to helping Meta develop a global following. WhatsApp is incredibly popular around the world, including in countries like India and Brazil. That that has been a part of how it's been able to ward off competitors, is that if you are on WhatsApp, you are more likely potentially to also be using other Meta products, and that helps cement its alleged dominance in that space.

Amina Srna: That makes sense. Listeners, this is The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Amina Srna filling in for Brian today. My guest is Cristiano Lima-Strong, associate editor at Tech Policy Press. We can take a few of your comments or questions at 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. You can also text that number. Cristiano, what are some of the key pieces of evidence that experts think the FTC will draw on, or maybe you want to weigh in on who they'll call to testify aside from Zuckerberg?

Cristiano Lima-Strong: Sure. As we've alluded to, there will be, I'm sure, more revelations about how the company was thinking at the time about these two nascent competitors. I think we're also going to see a lot of evidence about how the company, its competitors have viewed the market. We've been talking about this idea of personal social networking. The key here for the agency is to establish that there is a market.

We've already seen some evidence about to what extent do users flock to different services under different circumstances, or to what extent have they not. For example, there's been some evidence that there was a waning of public sentiment towards Facebook after the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, and yet the company has continued to have a very strong user base. There was not necessarily a mass exodus at the time. These are the kinds of things that the agency is going to try to surface to show that users are, in some sense, as they allege, locked into these services because they want to connect with their family and friends who are also there.

Then in terms of witnesses, as you've alluded to, we saw Zuckerberg testify yesterday. His testimony is expected to continue. We're likely to see a parade of executives, current and former, at the trial, including former COO Sheryl Sandberg, who was key to a lot of these decisions at the time and how these products were integrated. I think we're also going to see, and what might be particularly compelling for the judge is expert economists talking about what really serves as a barrier to entry in this market and how did these acquisitions potentially put up hurdles that would be competitors may not have been able to overcome.

Amina Srna: I was listening to your Tech Policy Press podcast yesterday, and you mentioned that this case actually goes back to Trump's first term, starting in December 2020. Back then, Trump had a pretty bitter and public feud with Zuckerberg. We'll work our way up to the present, but can you take us back to that political atmosphere during the beginnings of this case?

Cristiano Lima-Strong: Yes, absolutely. This was filed at the very tail end of the first Trump administration in 2020. Trump and Republicans have for years had a very acrimonious relationship with social media companies, primarily around concerns about alleged censorship on their platforms, this idea that they have been unfairly suppressing conservative viewpoints on their sites. Facebook, of course, in the aftermath of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, suspended the president. Certainly, that inspired a lot of uproar among Republicans.

There has also been now, for many years, growing bipartisan concern about the power and the competitive power of these large tech companies. This lawsuit at the time, which was filed on a bipartisan basis by the FTC under Trump, was one of the first major federal cases showing that bipartisan concern about their power, about their dominance, and their ability to quash potential competitors.

Amina Srna: Why did this case take five years to get to court? Is that normal for antitrust trials generally?

Cristiano Lima-Strong: Yes. It's certainly fair to say that this has not been moving at a lightning pace. One of the hurdles here was that this lawsuit was initially dismissed. The same federal judge that's now hearing the trial dismissed the lawsuit in 2021, basically saying that the agency had failed to establish enough evidence of a market here. The agency, during the Biden administration, refiled the case. It offered more evidence. It buttressed its arguments, and then the judge said, "Yes, this can proceed now," and later on did also reject an attempt by Meta for summary judgment, which is basically to get an early decision before going to trial.

The judge said, "No, we need to take this to trial. Neither side has convincingly won." I think some other factor here and what legal experts have said is that the court hearing this, the US District Court for the District of Columbia, has been very busy. They've been dealing with a lot of the January 6th cases, cases around presidential immunity. It's also had a very busy and high-profile docket to contend with. As big as this case is for the economy, it's also been amid a lot of other important cases that it's taken up.

Amina Srna: Let's go to a call. Brigitte in Manhattan. Hi, you're on WNYC.

Brigitte: Hi, how are you? Thank you for taking my call. I don't understand. I understand that Facebook, Instagram, especially Facebook, has a bunch of ads. It's profitable for people like Zuckerberg to make money or to have company pay to be on Facebook, et cetera, to advertise. However, Instagram doesn't have that or very little. The worst part is WhatsApp. WhatsApp, it's free. Well, all of them are free. All the platforms are free, but WhatsApp, it's a very important way of communicating for free all over the world with people all over the world and where we are. Whether we are outside of this country, whether we travel, we can connect for free. That's a major, major advantage for us.

I don't know what Zuckerberg gained by not charging anybody for that. Nobody pays anything. Moreover, I know plenty of people, especially older generation, that absolutely do not go on social media, do not own social media, but they communicate very well on WhatsApp. WhatsApp is a very different entity that really help communicating for free. If the FCC is trying to get hold of that and make us pay something, that will be really bad because I fear that's what's going to happen. What do you think?

Amina Srna: I hear you, Brigitte. Thank you so much for your call. Cristiano, I'm going to let you respond in just one second, but I do want to give the call-in number one more time. Listeners, we're going to shift more into the politics of this trial. Trump and Zuckerberg, their changing relationship, and what that might mean for the future of this trial. 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. Cristiano, Brigitte brings up a really great question, which I think a lot of people do have. I've definitely heard-- I believe a senator once asked Zuckerberg, "How does Meta make money?"

Cristiano Lima-Strong: That's a great point. Again, these are free services, but the company makes its money, a lot of it, off of advertising. The fact that it has such a large user base, billions of users are using these apps, it's able to sell ads off of that. Some of what the caller alluded to, Meta does not publicly disclose app-specific information about its revenue, but Instagram is expected to make up a significant chunk of its revenue this year, potentially a majority. It is a huge driver of revenue.

WhatsApp is a bit different. It is not necessarily the biggest moneymaker for the company, but the company is increasingly turned to monetizing some of the messaging services that it has. I think we're going to potentially see that trend accelerate in coming years. Again, it is able to extend the reach of its networks because it has some of these integrated services and able to offer them as companions to one another and able to use some of potentially data from different services to power other parts of its business.

Amina Srna: This is The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Amina Srna filling in for Brian today. We're going to take a quick break. When we get back, more of the politics of this antitrust trial. Back in a minute.

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Amina Srna: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Amina Srna. Good morning again, everyone. My guest is Cristiano Lima-Strong from Tech Policy Press, a newish non-profit media company. Cristiano, I want to close the loop on how we began, beginning with Trump's first term in 2020, going through to the near future.

Before he won the November election, Trump threatened to throw Zuckerberg in prison. He said Zuckerberg's platforms, if they did anything to hurt Trump's chances on the campaign trail, he would "Spend the rest of his life in prison." Then Zuckerberg started to very publicly praise Trump, eventually donating $1 million to his inaugural campaign and attending the inauguration itself. I'll ask you about lobbying efforts in a second, but first, can you walk us through some of that and when Zuckerberg decided to make his support of Trump so public?

Cristiano Lima-Strong: That prison comment you said you referenced feels like quite a while ago at this point. The main thing that has happened since is that the company has really pivoted some of its content moderation practices, how it polices user content on its sites in the wake of Trump's win. We saw late last year the company opted to scrap its fact-checking program, which for years it had partnered with news outlets to offer fact checks on articles and content that surfaced on the site. They decided to wind that down.

They also said that they were going to be revamping some of its policies around particular types of content that have become politicized, including around gender, sexuality, immigration. A lot of critics of the company saw this as pandering to Trump, that these are things that Republicans have wanted to see the company do for years, and then after Trump wins, here Facebook is taking a lot of changes that would be welcomed by the new president.

What the company has said is that these have been moves to restore the ideals of free speech on the site, which they have been a bedrock of the company for years. We've seen this have a cooling effect on their relationship. We've not heard Trump, since entering office, talk about throwing Zuckerberg in prison. It's been quite different. He's talked about he's more fond of him now. You can see that those moves have at least been welcomed by the White House.

Amina Srna: We have a caller on this. Let's go to Alan in Brooklyn. Hi, Alan, you're on WNYC.

Alan: Good morning. Thanks for the topic. I had never been on Facebook until after the 2020 election showed that there was more rational moderation to screen clearly inaccurate information. They change-- That seems to have been coerced on many social media sites since the 2024 election to force removal of screening for inaccuracies is a matter of concern. What I find inconsistent is that after they said they're no longer going to screen for facts, I received a number of administrator notices on Facebook saying, "This particular post, which is basically a satire or opinion, is inaccurate and we're planning on removing it but if you'd like to comment, let us know."

Often if I commented that, "Hey, you're saying you're no longer fact-checking politicians, why are you fact-checking ordinary citizens who are posting?" Very often, they would relent and say, "Oh, we're withdrawing in our plan to take down your post of opinion." The very idea that they would do that after announcing they're getting rid of screening is preposterous and obviously inconsistent.

Amina Srna: Thank you so much for your call, Alan. Cristiano, Facebook had moved to or Meta had moved to more of a user crowdsourcing fact check. I'm forgetting the actual term, but it's more in line with what a platform like X does, right?

Cristiano Lima-Strong: Right. They're mimicking what X is doing, which is called Community Notes-

Amina Srna: That's what it is.

Cristiano Lima-Strong: -which is basically a crowdsourced fact-checking where users can police themselves. This is something that some other smaller platforms, places like Reddit, have done that type of thing for a long time. The idea being that the moderation isn't going to be centralized. It's not going to be as much the company weighing in, but it's more going to be users policing themselves.

We should note, and I think this is certainly something to watch, that while Facebook Meta made changes to scrap fact-checking from, from news outlets and to loosen some of their policies, they still do have extensive policies around what can and can't be posted on the site that they're going to continue to enforce. We've already seen some Republicans say that the changes that are made aren't enough, that there should be more. That's, I think, something to watch going forward, is that is there going to be more changes from the company if the Trump administration, if Republicans continue to be dissatisfied with how much they've done.

Amina Srna: Cristiano, can we just go back briefly to our first caller's question? We had talked about why the products were free, and her follow-up question was also that she was, or her concern was that she was worried that the government was going to split up these companies and ask people to maybe pay for free services like WhatsApp. The FTC so far, my understanding is they're asking Facebook or Meta to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp, and then those would be acquired by other companies that could do whatever they want. Right?

Cristiano Lima-Strong: Yes. The first thing that's going to happen here is the trial is going to decide whether the court deems that Meta has a monopoly here and that it has maintained a monopoly. Then we'd likely head to a second trial to determine what the remedy should be, what should actually be done about it. The federal government's very likely, as you alluded to, to push for divestiture there. I think the core of what the user was asking about is what happens to these apps, to these platforms if they are indeed spun off.

A part of this is also something that's ongoing in the trial, which is what would they have become had Meta not acquired them. Meta has argued that it has improved these products and that it has helped them reach the scale that they have by scooping them up in the 2010s. What the federal government is arguing is that, no, they've actually weakened the products and that they might have been even stronger and provided a more critical service as the caller was talking about had they not been acquired.

That's going to be a key part of if the government is able to prove monopoly is talking about, is a divestiture required here to address this alleged monopoly, and will it actually make these products better and improve things for consumers? Which is ultimately the underlying consideration here in this case.

Amina Srna: Let's take another caller. Edward in Manhattan. I believe you have some pushback on the FTC's moves.

Edward: Yes. Hi. Thank you for taking my call. Let me just say up front, I have a Facebook page. I don't think I've been on it in six or eight years. I've never been on Instagram. I do use WhatsApp when traveling. I find it absurd that the government wants to come in 13 years after Instagram has been merged and integrated with Facebook and 10 years in the case of WhatsApp and now raise their objections.

When a couple gets married, you get a chance if you have anything to say, or else forever hold your peace. Why didn't the government raise this in 2013, 2014, 2015? Why did they wait until these were fully integrated companies? They can't be separated at this point. They operate as one. Are they going to go in and tell Procter, "Hey, when you met Gamble 75 years ago, you were colluding, so we're going to break up Procter and Gamble or Abercrombie and Fitch or Johnson and Johnson"?

It's ridiculous to come in in a new decade and practically in a new century. Certainly, technology has changed dramatically, these websites have changed dramatically. Let me just add also, to argue that Facebook or Meta did not add value to Instagram is ridiculous. The thing was worth a billion when they bought it. It's probably worth 400 billion today. It has Threads, it has, what's the other one, Reels. It has so many new features that it never had before. The idea that they haven't added value, it's ridiculous, but going in and trying to break up fully integrated companies 10, 20 years later, it doesn't make any sense on any level. That's my whole comment.

Amina Srna: Edward, thank you so much for your call. We really appreciate it. For someone who isn't on Instagram, you know a lot more about it than I do. Cristiano, we did talk a little bit about the FTC's role in the beginning of this and that they didn't approve of the acquisitions, but to Edward's point of the full integration and/or maybe the value of Instagram, how much would that play into the trial now? Is this information that would probably come up?

Cristiano Lima-Strong: Just one point of clarification, the lawsuits were filed in 2020. It has been four and a half years to get to this point, not quite a decade, but I take the caller's point-

Amina Srna: I see. To trial.

Cristiano Lima-Strong: Yes, that's right. I take the caller's point that it was several years after the transactions that they brought this challenge. Certainly, this is something that Meta has argued and a lot of the business community has said, which is, is this a slippery slope that the federal regulators being able to reach back in time and challenge transactions from several years prior, is that going to create an environment where companies feel like any past merger acquisition is never truly closed?

Certainly, this is something that we're going to likely hear the company continue to argue, but the court has affirmed that, yes, the agency had the right to bring this challenge even though it had happened years prior.

Amina Srna: We have a couple of listeners calling and texting in about how they use Meta's products to run their businesses. Let's go to John in Manhattan. Hi, John, you're on WNYC.

John: Hello. Thanks for taking my call. I do have a question about posting links to online stores. I have one, and I have noticed that Instagram and Facebook don't allow you anymore to link out to a different online store. They have their own sales platforms, and they want you to use those. I'm just wondering if you're talking about monopolies stifling competition, is something like that something that the courts would consider? The fact that you have to sell products through them if you use their platform.

Amina Srna: John, thank you so much for your call. Cristiano, do you have an answer for John?

Cristiano Lima-Strong: Yes. I'm not familiar with the particulars of linking out, but this is what's typically referred to as self-preferencing. This idea that a company is able to give its own products preferential treatment because it owns a large platform, so it's able to reroute users to some of its own other services. This is something that's a more novel competition theory. I'm not sure if it's something that the court would actively consider in this case, but it's certainly something that competition advocates for a long time have been sounding the alarm about being an anti-competitive effect of a monopoly in this space.

Amina Srna: Here's another related text. "I'm a photographer who's been using Instagram and Facebook for the past 13 years. Since Facebook acquired Instagram, I've seen a huge shift in how artists and content creators are able to reach people. We used to be able to organically connect with new audiences, now Meta controls our visibility. A large percentage of my followers don't even see my posts unless I pay to promote them, despite the fact that they chose to follow me. That's always felt unfair, and I genuinely hope Meta is eventually forced to sell."

As we wrap up, Cristiano, you were, I think, getting into this in your last answer, but the FTC's case against Meta is the third major tech antitrust lawsuit to go to trial in the last couple of years. Last year, the Justice Department won its antitrust case against Google for monopolizing internet search. Can you put this Meta antitrust case in a bit of broader context for us? Why is the FTC going after big tech now, if you can speculate?

Cristiano Lima-Strong: Absolutely. I think there's a widespread sentiment in Washington that federal regulators, that policymakers for a long time, were asleep at the wheel with these firms. In the early 2010s, there was a sentiment that these were champions, bastions of American innovation. I think a lot of policymakers and regulators now feel like, in hindsight, they should have been a lot more critical and scrutinized some of the acquisitions that were happening at the time.

As you've alluded to, there have been several trials in those antitrust cases. There's an antitrust challenge against Apple and one against Amazon. This is really a reckoning of the power of these digital services that have become really ubiquitous in our lives, but that a bipartisan group of officials in Washington increasingly feel like have established their presence in our lives in part by squashing competitors and being able to warp them off before they really get out of the cradle. This is going to be another major test of whether that concern can translate into legal action and can map onto our nation's antitrust laws.

Amina Srna: More to be seen, that's for sure. That's all the time we have for today. Our guest has been Cristiano Lima-Strong, associate editor at Tech Policy Press. Thanks so much for coming on, Cristiano. This was a wonkier one.

Cristiano Lima-Strong: Thanks so much for having me. Glad to be a part of the wonkery.

 

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