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?
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.
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.
Trump declared moral bankruptcy decades ago.
More like Facebook worked overtime to tip the 2020 election towards Biden and Trump is still mad about it.
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.
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.
There’s still time to bribe the old man.
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.
It’s the same in Ireland, WhatsApp is pervasive. It was a great app until Zuck bought it. It’s still a good app but I hate using anything by him.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
If you buy all the competition, you can set the price/rules.
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.
Truly one of the greatest cover images of all time
…did they lose already?
