It\u2019s too bad there are no cameras allowed in federal courtrooms, because I really would like to see Mark Zuckerberg testify.<\/p>\n
He was the leadoff witness in the Federal Trade Commission\u2019s antitrust lawsuit against Meta, and that in itself was news.<\/p>\n
The clash is the most sweeping attempt to dismember the world\u2019s biggest social network, and goes to the heart of how competition is defined.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Not since the government broke up AT&T more than four decades ago has a mega-corporation faced the prospect of being torn apart.<\/p>\n
The suit was filed in the first Trump term (the president couldn\u2019t stand Facebook at the time), aggressively pursued by Joe Biden, and now has finally come to trial in a Washington courtroom.<\/p>\n
Trump once told me Facebook was such a threat to society that he used it as justification for flip-flopping on his effort to ban TikTok. <\/p>\n
But since he won a second term, Zuck, like many tech bros, has been cozying up to the new sheriff in town, including a $1-million donation to the president\u2019s inaugural.<\/p>\n
There are reports that when the man who runs Facebook recently met with Trump, he asked about the possibility of dropping the lawsuit. Obviously, it didn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n
The focus of the trial is Zuckerberg\u2019s decision to buy Instagram and WhatsApp when they were small start-ups.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
The FTC\u2019s lead lawyer questioned Zuckerberg about a platform meant to foster ties between family and friends to a concentration on showing users interesting third-party content through its news feed.<\/p>\n
‘It\u2019s the case that over time, the \u2018interest\u2019 part of that has gotten built out more than the \u2018friend\u2019 part,’ Zuckerberg said. He added that ‘the \u2018friend\u2019 part has gone down quite a bit, but it\u2019s still something we care about.’<\/p>\n
Translation: Screw the friends. Very 2010s. We\u2019ve moved on.<\/p>\n