Welcome to the Tech Meme Right Home for Thursday, December 10th, 2020. I'm Brian McCullough. Today I try to give you the outlines of the whole Facebook antitrust thing and what I think it means for tech

Airbnb makes its market debut

crunchy roll finds a safe home away from AT&T

I bet the folks at HBO are jealous. Boston Dynamics finds a new home as well that

hopefully can find something useful for it to do. And it is really finally the end of

the road for Flash. Here's what you missed today finally the end of the road for Flash.

Here's what you missed today in the world of Tech.

Well, it did happen.

The FTC in coalition with 46 state attorneys general plus Guam and the

District of Columbia have sued Facebook alleging the Instagram and what-s app acquisitions were used to stifle competition in the marketplace.

I'm going to point out that the FTC suit and the states suit are two different cases.

These are not combined, which I think could be important,

because number one, Facebook can argue that the FTC is being disingenuous

since it already signed off on these acquisitions years ago, so they can be like, you know, no-take-backsees on this.

Whereas the states never signed off on anything, so they can claim harm more directly.

And second, the FTC's lawsuit at least to my reading is more, you know, throw everything and the kitchen sink in there. People are reading everything they want to into it. Consumers have seen their privacy harmed, advertisers have

choice limited, the marketplace has been distorted, whereas I think the state's

case is more directly about the marketplace being distorted.

Conversely, though, the FTC's suit

explicitly seeks to unwind the Instagram

and WhatsApp acquisitions to make those spun out

as independent companies, whereas the state's cases in my opinion more vague

...