What would life have been like for you, for me, and for Mark Zuckerberg if Facebook had not bought

WhatsApp and Instagram back when it did? This is the world, the fantasy world, that the government

has to basically construct in the FTC's trial of meta that goes on this week. It's a big deal. This is an antitrust trial that would,

in theory, force Facebook to basically separate itself from WhatsApp and Instagram if it didn't go

its way. The argument that the government is making here is that basically by buying those two companies,

it has essentially as a company, made itself a monopoly, something that no smaller competitor

can really have an edge on because they have come to so totally dominate how you and I

communicate with one another, share

photographs, even shop online. Now, you have to go back and think about the world that Facebook

occupied back when it bought both of those companies. At that time, Facebook was a very

dominant player, but already Mark Zuckerberg clearly could see that there

was, you know, a limit to the growth that Facebook was going to experience and that there were new

competitors coming in. Mark Zuckerberg is a famously competitive guy, the sort of the rumor, you

know, the legend around Silicon Valley is that if you ever go to one hacker way, to the famous offices, you know, the legend around Silicon Valley is that if you ever go to one hacker way,

to the famous offices in Silicon Valley where Facebook was first headquartered, now it's

meta, that big thumbs up sign that's so iconic, it's now just a meta logo. But on the backside

of that, he had saved the logo of the last company that had been there.

And that Sun Microsystems went out of business. He left it there, the legend is, to show his

employees, we could be replaced at any time. He's talking in the past about not wanting to do,

have done to Facebook, what Facebook did to MySpace, wiping it out.

So he's, you know, famous for being extremely conscious of what it is that these competitors,

you know, represented in his life. And already in the second day of his testimony in Washington,

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