It's Thursday, December 10th. Welcome to Market Foolery. I'm Chris Hill with me today. Bill Barker in the house. Good to see you.

I am in my house. It's good to be here. We have for the second day in a row another red-hot

IPO we're going to get to that we're going to get to Starbucks hitting a new all-time

high but we will start today with the

Social Network. The Federal Trade Commission and 46 states have filed two separate antitrust

lawsuits against Facebook.

Both are alleging anti-competitive conduct that could result in Facebook having to spin

off Instagram and WhatsApp, but based on the fact that shares of Facebook are

basically flat right now, it kind of seems like nobody thinks that's actually

going to happen. Well, the market as a whole doesn't think that's going to happen.

You've got the individual attorneys general, state attorneys general, FTC thinking it might happen, hoping that they're not wasting their time here.

They've got people who are probably involved in this for the right reasons and some who are involved in it for publicity or or I'm not sure what but I don't know

that a lawsuit that has 47 leaders is the one that I would bet on being more successful

than something more targeted.

And as you say correctly, the most important observer of this,

I would say the collective market sees it as a non-event so far. And part of Facebook's initial response is to say and

their right to say this, hey federal trade commission, you cleared these acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp.

You already had a shot when we came and said, hey, we're thinking about buying this company.

Are you okay with that and you were like yeah no

that's good yeah that's a that is a fact in their favor and I guess that as things

stand now the monopoly power that is alleged by the FTC and the

states is greater for Facebook today than at the time of the acquisitions and so that would be one of their responses.

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