For anyone, like me, confused by the title: no verdict has been reached, and the trial expected to last for about seven more weeks.
this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2025
715 points (98.0% liked)
Technology
69109 readers
2352 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
Wouldn’t it be fun if one day a year every billionaire had to go without bodyguards ?
Do you think the rest of the year they would act differently?
The only crime he committed was not bribing the Trump administration enough to stay off the anti-trust radar. I hope they burn it all to the ground.
I'd say the crime he committed was thinking Trump would keep his promise even after bribing him.
How anyone can trust this motherfucker is beyond me.
Trump declared moral bankruptcy decades ago.
load more comments
(6 replies)
There’s still time to bribe the old man.
Are you implying that he bribed the previous administrations, as nothing happened until now?
Well, FOIA requests revealed Facebook was extremely cooperative with both enacting government censorship requests, and keeping them secret, when those same censorship requests would have been utterly illegal if they were an official order, so...
Some deal like "You give us control over information and we leave your monopoly alone", even unspoken, seems to be the gist of it.
load more comments
(2 replies)
I mean it's nice that he had a bad day, but ain't shit gonna happen other than the legal fees.
None of which affects his bottom line regardless as the company itself absorbs the loss. He can run his mouth and it’s 10k jobs that get cut and everyone else works that much harder to keep up.
People that wield so much power without consequence or control is everything that is wrong with everything.
Why not? Can't it lead to Meta breakup?
Trump's first administration filed the lawsuit that led to the court determination that Google held a search monopoly. The result of that is the DOJ filed a proposal that Google sell chrome web browser to another entity. Google has been fighting this proposal tooth and nail.
So the answer is, I'll believe Meta gets broken up when I see it.
We're in post law society, I can't even believe the trump admin is going after tech giants. So i believe anything is possible here. I can't imagine anything the admin does will be good for society so maybe its safe to assume they will be broken up so elon can buy a chunk?
I can't even believe the trump admin is going after tech giants.
I share the disbelief. I think it is mostly a power play against not just Google, but all tech giants, which must be watching this closely, given most of them operate in a similarly anticompetitive manner: kiss the ring or else. The Trump administration could give Google reprieve in exchange for axing DEI further and helping push their political agenda.
I can't imagine anything the admin does will be good for society so maybe its safe to assume they will be broken up so elon can buy a chunk?
I think so too: if Google doesn't satisfy Trump and his administration, parts of it will be forcibly sold as private equity, outside of shareholder scrutiny and beyond the reach of the SEC. Such a private company would be easier to control than a publicly traded one.
Yea i guess the most simple explanation, that is most coherent with the rest of the administration's actions, is that it's just a mob style shake down of every major economic player. Pure extortion as the japanese said.
But ya its funny to see the SEC and DOJ neutered and then actually used against big tech. Ironic and poetic, and fucking stupid. It really burns at the senses, and creates confusion.
load more comments
(4 replies)
Please, please, make them sell WhatsApp.
Signal: "I'm right over here, guys! Just click on me, install me, tell your friends. Hellooo!"
I'd love to have people move over to other apps. But here in Germany it's nearly impossible to have a messenger group on any other app than WhatsApp. Everybody is on there. For every other app there will be someone not having it installed. It doesn't matter if 80% are on Signal, 80% in Threema and 80% on Telegram. 100% are on Whatsapp and that's what the group will be using.
It's the same in Ireland, WhatsApp is pervasive. It was a great app until Zuck bought it. It's still a good app but I hate using anything by him.
That's not been my experience at all (also in Germany). Signal is super popular, especially with younger people (under 40). I don't have a Whatsapp account and it's super rare for it to be an issue.
load more comments
(1 replies)
load more comments
(2 replies)
To a non US company please.
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.
Wait....I haven't been following the story. Why is him buying Instagram a bad thing legally?
Buying your competitors is a pretty monopolistic practice
You can’t buy a company with the intent to stifle competition.
They tried to compete with insta and failed, and he was concerned with insta’s potential to create features that compete with fb.
He then said the plan was to invest as little as possible in insta and only add features if competition sprouted up.
That makes sense.
Other than the fact that it happens all the time and nothing happens because, as OP mentioned, most people aren't dumb enough to put it in writing
If you buy all the competition, you can set the price/rules.
Lmao
What's even funnier is that he'll pay a relatively insignificant fine, and be able to continue and profit from the monopoly.
Corporate dictatorships masquerading as "democracy" is FUN!
Blessed be the profit margins. May the lord open.
It’s very hard to actually get a company broken up and I can’t remember ever seeing it happen. But when your antitrust case is judged against you, they don’t just charge you a fine and say “on your way now.”
Yeah somehow Microsoft dodged it in 2001 which is pretty mind-boggling because they were supreme at that point
Yeah office should have been split and MSN too. But we have had oligarchs calling the shot for eons.
i only know of this because I did an internship at AT&T https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System
The ATT orientation video about that is hilarious. It shows how Ma Bell was broken up, and then it just circles back around to it coming back together. On a map, with arrows lol
Yeah, Ma Bell breaking up into the Baby Bells is the only real example I can think of, and even they came back together later (though, by then, there was enough diversity in the market that they couldn't reclaim the level of market dominance they once had)
Proof that rich does not mean smart
You love to see it
He's smart, but not wise. When you don't know everything and don't know what you don't know, you act carefully. When it comes to the law, you should be extra careful and he should have had attorneys that advised him again putting this shit in writing.
Lol this is the typical takeaway. A better result would be to not engage in illegal practices and then it doesn't matter if you put it in writing, but that's not how you become a billionaire.
I'm with you. For the record, I was not advising people to act unethically, just surprised he wasn't better at it.
I mean, every time we hire a new manager (not high level mind you) we tell them that whatever they communicate digitally, they better be comfortable with it being read in court.
Billionaires really have fuck you level of money. They just don’t care to think at all, and they’re okay with that. Gross.
Only way this would matter is if they were forced to sell or spin off Instagram and Whatsapp.
It would be very strange at this point to not see him be forced to spin them off. I mean, this is the trump admin. Anything is possible, but this is egregious (and also it would benefit musk if he was forced to do so)
view more: next ›