384: The Facebook Antitrust Case

Tech Policy Podcast

TechFreedom

Technology

4.8 • 45 Ratings

🗓️ 9 September 2024

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Geoff Manne (International Center for Law & Economics) and Corbin Barthold (TechFreedom) discuss the many, many flaws in the FTC’s antitrust lawsuit against Meta (Facebook). A crossover episode with the Washington Legal Foundation / TechFreedom Tech in the Courts series. Topics include: - The ontology of Facebook - Social networking: it’s not 2008 anymore - The FTC’s made-up market - The WhatsApp Catch-22 - Has Facebook been enshittified? - Product design by government: bad idea! - Growing startups: hard, actually Links: The Feds Unfriend Facebook: Why the FTC’s Meta Antitrust Case Should Fail (https://tinyurl.com/k988vjn8) Tech Policy Podcast 357: The Amazon Antitrust Case (https://tinyurl.com/2s4xz9xs) Tech Policy Podcast 353: The Google Search Antitrust Trial (https://tinyurl.com/mryvmrce) Tech Policy Podcast 302: Epic v. Apple (https://tinyurl.com/39chu42b)

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Corbyn Barthold.
0:27.4	Thanks to Washington Legal Foundation for hosting this second installment of the WLF Tech Freedom Tech in the Courts series.
0:35.5	Today's talk is doubling as an episode of the tech policy podcast.
0:39.7	So, for those of you listening there, welcome back to the show.
0:44.5	I'm pleased to be joined once again by Jeff Manny, president and founder of the International
0:50.9	Center for Law and Economics.
0:53.7	On the podcast, Jeff and I have been running something of a big tech antitrust in the
0:59.1	courts series.
1:00.9	We've done United States versus Google.
1:03.2	We've done FTC versus Amazon.
1:05.9	We've done Epic versus Apple.
1:08.2	And we'll soon get to United States versus Apple.
1:12.0	Jeff and I have questioned and critiqued these lawsuits, and I think all of our discussions
1:17.0	are worth checking out. But this one today is special. Today, we'll be tackling the longest,
1:26.1	the weakest, the most wasteful, the most misguided lawsuit of them all.
1:32.1	FTC versus Facebook.
1:35.0	FTC versus Facebook is at any rate what the lawsuit was called back when it was filed 1,366 days ago.
1:44.0	That was late 2020. Now it's FTC versus Meta. The district judge initially
1:51.1	granted a motion to dismiss the suit. The FTC then crawled its way past the motion to dismiss
1:57.5	stage in 2022 by pleading a contrived fantasy world social media market
2:03.9	in which the likes of YouTube, TikTok, and X-Twitter don't exist.
2:09.8	The case then embarked on years of discovery, tens of millions of pages of documents have been
	...

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