Welcome to Wired's Uncanny Valley. I'm Wired's director of business and industry, Zoe Schiffer.

Today on the show, we're talking about the FTC versus META trial. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is alleging that META illegally acquired Instagram and WhatsApp in an effort to suppress competition.

And it wants to force META to spin off those

assets into separate entities. Yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg took the stand to defend his company. We're

going to get into it today. I'm joined by Peresh DeVay, senior writer at Wired, to talk about the trial.

Peresh, welcome to Uncanny Valley. Hey, thanks, Zoe. Okay, Perash, before we get started,

what's the big story here? The FTC is trying to get Facebook to sell off WhatsApp and Instagram.

I mean, that's huge. That's a big deal. Let's start with what the FTC is actually arguing here,

because this is something you and I have talked about in recent days. What's,

what's the theory of the case? Yeah, it's a couple of things. So one, that Facebook has a long

standing monopoly on providing what's known in the FTC's parlance as personal social networking

services in the U.S. So we all know Facebook is a social media platform, but what kind of social

media platform is it? In the FTC's view, it competes with Snapchat and this little known thing

called Miwi that are about connecting with friends and family. And so in the FTC's argument, TikTok, YouTube,

all these other social media services we know of

are not competitors to Facebook

because those are about watching creators,

not really about connecting with family and friends.

So one, the FTC has to establish that Facebook

has this monopoly on personal social networking services,

and the judge has to go along with that being the right market here.

And then two, the argument is that Facebook made these acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp over a decade ago,

...