Did nobody have the "talk" with Zuckerberg?

If you think that the modern captains of industry learned anything from the antitrust takedowns of the robber-barons from the gilded age, think again. The clownery is delightful!

I subscribe to Cory Doctorow’s daily email. It is not really a newsletter, and the man is maniacal, constantly aggregating interesting nuggets. Today, his Pluralistic top report is on the Facebook (Meta) Antitrust Trial. And it is fucking glorious.

First, here’s the link: Mark Zuckerberg personally lost the Facebook antitrust case (18 April 2025)

It is 100% worth reading. I had heard and read a few things on this during the week where I shook my head at the stupidity, but this recap is just unalloyed joy.

Cory begins with this factual recitation of the challenge in winning an antitrust case:

It's damned hard to prove an antitrust case: so often, the prosecution has to prove that the company intended to crush competition, and/or that they raised prices or reduced quality because they knew they didn't have to fear competitors.

It's a lot easier to prove what a corporation did than it is to prove why they did it.

This is fact. In fact, a LOT of antitrust cases fall apart before even getting to the trial stage because there isn’t enough evidence to document the malfeasance. The case of the Ford Pinto fuel tank fiasco taught valuable lessons to mega corporations to NOT PUT SHIT in WRITING.

But imagine for a second that the corporation in the dock is a global multinational. Now, imagine that the majority of the voting shares in that company are held by one man, who has served as the company's CEO since the day he founded it, personally calling every important shot in the company's history.

This is also truth. Zuck sits alone on his throne, and the way Meta is structured, he cannot be fired, or really sidelined.

Of course, for more than a decade after FB went public, they have bought a lot of rising stars in the social space, Instagram, WhatsApp and others. This led to speculation about anticompetitive practices, but by and large the feds kept their hands off.

Until now that is. The Francis Haugen exposé and other drops got the FTC to finally take some action. And hoo-boy is it going Grrrreeeeeeeaaaaattttt!

Pretty early on in my life as a product manager, I was inculcated that there were things you just do not put into writing. No memos, no emails, no SMS messages. That is because all those things are discoverable that is, if you have to go to court, that some opposing counsel will be able to grab copies of all your communications, files and records (electronic, printed, handwritten) and go a’ hunting. And take it from me, someone who has been deposed twice, it is really fucking scary to have the opposing counsel slide a printed email under your nose and ask you pointed questions.

Gnarly.

Now imagine that this founder/CEO, this accused monopolist, was an incorrigible blabbermouth, who communicated with his underlings almost exclusively in writing, and thus did he commit to immortal digital storage a stream – a torrent – of memos in which he explicitly confessed his guilt.

Ladies and gentlepersons, I give you Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Meta (nee Facebook), an accused monopolist who cannot keep his big dumb fucking mouth shut.

You know how you lose an antitrust case? That is it. That is the entire story.

As I mentioned, it took a long time to get to trial, and last Monday, Zuck took the stand, and … well read for yourself:

At long, long last, the FTC's antitrust trial against Meta is underway, and this week, Zuck himself took the stand, in agonizing sessions during which FTC lawyers brandished printouts of Zuck's own words before him, asking him to explain away his naked confessions of guilt. It did not go well for Zuck.

Dee-light-full!

The government is attempting to prove that Zuck bought Instagram and Whatsapp in order to extinguish competitors (and not, for example, because he thought they were good businesses that complemented Facebook's core product offerings).

This case starts by proving how Zuck felt about Insta and WA before the acquisitions. On Insta, Zuck circulated memos warning about Insta's growth trajectory:

they appear to be reaching critical mass as a place you go to share photos

and how that could turn them into a future competitor:

[Instagram could] copy what we’re doing now … I view this as a big strategic risk for us if we don’t completely own the photos space.

These are not the words of a CEO who thinks another company is making a business that complements his own – they're confessions that he is worried that they will compete with Facebook. Facebook tried to clone Insta (Remember Facebook Camera? Don't feel bad – neither does anyone else). When that failed, Zuck emailed Facebook execs, writing:

[Instagram's growth is] really scary and why we might want to consider paying a lot of money for this.

At this point, Zuck's CFO – one of the adults in the room, attempting to keep the boy king from tripping over his own dick – wrote to Zuck warning him that it was illegal to buy Insta in order to "neutralize a potential competitor."

So whoa, there is (was) an adult who tried to gently guide Zuck into not committing felonious trust…

So, I am sure that Zuck realized that he was being fucking stupid.

Narrator: No, he did not

Zuck replied that he was, indeed, solely contemplating buying Insta in order to neutralize a potential competitor. It's like this guy kept picking up his dictaphone, hitting "record," and barking, "Hey Bob, I am in receipt of your memo of the 25th, regarding the potential killing of Fred. You raise some interesting points, but I wanted to reiterate that this killing is to be a murder, and it must be as premeditated as possible. Yours very truly, Zuck."

Did Zuck buy Insta to neutralize a competitor? Sure seems like it! For one thing, Zuck cancelled all work on Facebook Camera "since we're acquiring Instagram."

Yeah, that seems … bad.

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So, Antitrust also is supposed to seek out practices that raise prices or reduce choice in the market. I am sure that Facebook didn’t make Instagram shittier - wait, I’m getting a message, well, that’s awkward:

But what about after the purchase. Did Zuck reduce quality and/or raise costs? Well, according to the company, it enacted an "explicit policy of not prioritizing Instagram’s growth" (a tactic called "buy or bury"). At this juncture, Zuckerberg once again put fingers to keyboard in order to create an immortal record of his intentions:

By not killing their products we prevent everyone from hating us and we make sure we don’t immediately create a hole in the market for someone else to fill.

And if someone did enter the market with a cool new gimmick (like, say, Snapchat with its disappearing messages)?

Even if some new competitors spring up, if we incorporate the social mechanics they were using, these new products won’t get much traction since we’ll already have their mechanics deployed at scale.

Oops.

But what about costs to the consumer? Here you have to remember that “cost” is attention and eyeballs on the screen. This is a long pull, and I will stop copy-pasta here, because Zuck’s done:

But what about prices? Well, obviously, Insta doesn't charge its end-users in cash, but they do charge in attention. If you want to see the things you've explicitly asked for – posts from accounts you follow – you have to tolerate a certain amount of "boosted content" and ads, that is, stuff that Facebook's business customers will pay to nonconsensually cram into your eyeballs.

Did that price go up? Any Insta user knows the answer: hell yes. Instagram is such a cesspit of boosted content and ads that it's almost impossible to find stuff you actually asked to see. Indeed, when a couple of teenagers hacked together an alternative Insta client called OG App that only showed you posts from accounts you followed, it was instantly the most popular app on Google Play and Apple's App Store (and then Google and Apple killed it, at Meta's request):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/05/battery-vampire/#drained

But why did the price go up? Did it go up because Facebook had neutralized a competitor by purchasing it, and thus felt that it could raise prices without losing customers? Again, a hard thing to prove…unless Zuck happened to put it in writing. Which he did, as Brendan Benedict explains in Big Tech On Trial:

I think we’re badly mismanaging this right now. There’s absolutely no reason why IG ad load should be lower than FB at a time when . . . we’re having engagement issues in FB. If we were managing our company correctly, then at a minimum we’d immediately balance IG and FB ad load . . . But it’s possible we should even have a higher ad load on IG while we have this challenge so we can replace some ads with [People You May Know] on FB to turn around the issues we’re seeing.

Zuckerberg v. Zuckerberg: Will the Real Facebook Founder Please Stand Up?

So there you have it: Zuck bought Insta to neutralize a competitor, and after he did, he lowered its quality and raised its prices, because he knew that he was operating without significant competitors thanks to his acquisition of that key competitor. Zuck's motivations – as explained by Zuck himself – were in direct contravention of antitrust law, a thing he knew (because his execs explained it to him). That's a pretty good case.

That is when we get to say, stick a fork in it, ‘cuz it’s DONE.

The Lesson

There’s an episode of The Wire (I never saw it) where someone at a meeting is taking notes about a conspiracy …

As I mentioned above, I have been deposed twice (never called to testify), and that is some seriously scary shit.

One way to make it less scary is to be cautious about your communications. My current employer is a Fortune 500 company, and every year we are inculcated in our code of business conduct. One of the lessons that they pound into your frontal cortex is to think about every message you send. Internal messaging tool (MS Teams, Slack, etc), email, even SMS messages on your personal phones, every memo, every set of slides you create. All of it is susceptible to discovery, and you can 100% count on the opposing counsel to find anything even remotely incriminating, and to amp it to eleven.

The current crop of Tech Broligarchs seems to have not been gifted with the sense to listen to their corporate counsel and to not conduct these transactions in media that can be discovered.

Look, I like messaging, the point to point, and the ability to scroll back. That is a feature, but it is also one of the risky as fuck things you can do.

If you are going to do something that is obviously illegal, pick up the phone. Or get on a plane and meet face to face.

Me thinks Zuckerberg shoulda stayed at Harvard long enough to take a business ethics course (and some philosophy to boot).

Me? I am going to enjoy my popcorn as I watch this unfold. The real question is whether Trump will intervene. Still, the damage to Zuck’s reputation is a delicious meal of schadenfreude.

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