Latest news with #POLITICOTech
Yahoo
17-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
An expert breaks down Zuckerberg's big week in court
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent hours in a Washington courtroom this week, answering questions about business decisions he made more than a decade ago — and whether the social media empire he now oversees is a monopoly. In an effort to break up Meta, government lawyers used old emails and documents to portray Zuckerberg as a nervous executive on the attack, buying up competitors Instagram and WhatsApp in 2012 and 2014, respectively, before they could displace his crown jewel, Facebook. But Zuckerberg and Meta's attorneys pushed back on that narrative in court. And in a statement, the company said that the 'weak lawsuit against Meta ignores reality,' including the competition for users' attention that Meta faces from TikTok, YouTube and other platforms. Losing the high-stakes lawsuit, which was brought by the Federal Trade Commission, could ultimately lead to the Silicon Valley behemoth being forced to cleave off Instagram and WhatsApp — a complex and messy unwinding that would upend the trillion-dollar giant. But U.S. District Judge James Boasberg sounded some notes of skepticism. Are they strong enough to save the company? Former Republican FTC Chair Bill Kovacic, who now leads the Competition Law Center at George Washington University, unpacked Meta's week in court on the POLITICO Tech podcast. The following excerpt of the conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the full interview on POLITICO Tech, available on Apple, Spotify, Audible or your preferred podcast player. The first few days of this trial have really been about trying to get inside the head of CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the time he bought Instagram and WhatsApp, mostly based on emails that were written more than a decade ago. What do you think those messages reveal? They reveal a mix of motives. One of the objectives that Zuckerberg's emails and correspondence lays out is, I think, a genuine desire to improve his platform and to improve the offerings to users. But in parallel to that, there is an awareness expressed fairly vividly that Instagram, in particular, might evolve in a way that would become a threat to Facebook at the time. That there would be a migration, inevitably, and it would happen fast. I suppose a key question in the court's mind is going to be which one predominates. What was the principal aim that the company had in mind in carrying out the acquisitions? And another question for the court is, is Meta's state of mind in 2012 relevant to deciding the case today? Part of what I think Mark Zuckerberg has been arguing in these first few days is, 'We did a good job with them. If the government's thought was that we were trying to bury them. And to take them off the field so that they would not disrupt at all, we didn't do that.' The FTC argues that Meta has a monopoly in the market that they refer to as 'personal social networking' and that its only real competitors are Snapchat and a smaller app called MeWe. Meta's lawyer is claiming that this definition is way too narrow. Do you think the lawyer has a point? Meta is going to have a fruitful issue here to work with. Judge James Boasberg, in November of last year, wrote a decision in which he leads off on the second page with a caution saying, 'Just because, FTC, you have lived to fight another day in this matter does not mean you're going to prevail.' And the issues that he comes back to through the opinion include the proper definition of the market. So the judge clearly has a lot of questions about that. And, I suspect, Meta will take a lot of care to try and reinforce those doubts. To say that even if these other services are not perfect substitutes for the personal social network service that we offer, they're pretty damn good alternatives and the overlap is significant enough, and that overlap is changing over time in ways that you can't draw a confident conclusion that Meta has monopoly power in the niche that the FTC is trying lay out. The question on everybody's mind is whether this could lead to Meta being broken up. If you were a gambling man, what odds would you be betting on? I guess I'd at least bet the price of a double espresso, maybe with a muffin thrown in, too. So high-stakes gambling, to be sure. But, if Judge Boasberg is sold on the FTC's theory of harm and ultimately says, 'I had doubts, but they convinced me. I wasn't seeing it, but they helped me see it,' that elevates a divestiture dramatically up the list of possibilities. The real issue will be whether he issues an opinion that says, 'You sold me on some of this, but it's a really close call. And I am not so persuaded that the competitive harm was so dramatic that I have to take this drastic step.' If you imagine it being a match in which we're counting goals, and the match is an 8-0 win for the plaintiff, the judge is probably more inclined to impose a more dramatic remedy. But if it's a close match, I think judges have been more inclined to say, 'Do I really need this form of more dramatic market intervention to cure the problem?' In that instance, there's more of a willingness to look for other solutions. In the lead up to this trial, Mark Zuckerberg made a number of trips to the White House and the Wall Street Journal reported that in those meetings he lobbied President Trump for a settlement in this case. Could Trump realistically step in before this trial is over? Indeed, he could. Would he? I think we see conflicting impulses. One concern that the president might have is that this kind of dramatic intervention is not necessary or helpful. That a big-bang remedy is not the right way to do things [and] that Meta is making a number of accommodating gestures and will still make more. On the other hand, we know that [FTC Chair] Andrew Ferguson was in the White House, too, and met with the president. And I suspect part of the conversation had to do with more conventional antitrust theories of harm, what the market might have looked at had it not been for these acquisitions. I suspect the discussion also focused on the kinds of deeply felt concerns that the president has about whether or not Meta helped turn the election against him in 2020. That the reason to be concerned about their size and market presence, their dominance, is that they dominate not only the economic sphere, they have an outsized influence in the political sphere. And they had it and they used it against you. 'And don't forget that, Mr. President.' And to the extent that you want a little bit of retribution here, here's your chance to get it. Subscribe to POLITICO Tech on Apple, Spotify, Audible or your preferred podcast player.
Politico
17-04-2025
- Business
- Politico
An expert breaks down Zuckerberg's big week in court
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg spent hours in a Washington courtroom this week, answering questions about business decisions he made more than a decade ago — and whether the social media empire he now oversees is a monopoly. In an effort to break up Meta, government lawyers used old emails and documents to portray Zuckerberg as a nervous executive on the attack, buying up competitors Instagram and WhatsApp in 2012 and 2014, respectively, before they could displace his crown jewel, Facebook. But Zuckerberg and Meta's attorneys pushed back on that narrative in court . And in a statement, the company said that the 'weak lawsuit against Meta ignores reality,' including the competition for users' attention that Meta faces from TikTok, YouTube and other platforms. Losing the high-stakes lawsuit, which was brought by the Federal Trade Commission, could ultimately lead to the Silicon Valley behemoth being forced to cleave off Instagram and WhatsApp — a complex and messy unwinding that would upend the trillion-dollar giant. But U.S. District Judge James Boasberg sounded some notes of skepticism. Are they strong enough to save the company? Former Republican FTC Chair Bill Kovacic, who now leads the Competition Law Center at George Washington University, unpacked Meta's week in court on the POLITICO Tech podcast . The following excerpt of the conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the full interview on POLITICO Tech, available on Apple , Spotify , Audible or your preferred podcast player. The first few days of this trial have really been about trying to get inside the head of CEO Mark Zuckerberg at the time he bought Instagram and WhatsApp, mostly based on emails that were written more than a decade ago. What do you think those messages reveal? They reveal a mix of motives. One of the objectives that Zuckerberg's emails and correspondence lays out is, I think, a genuine desire to improve his platform and to improve the offerings to users. But in parallel to that, there is an awareness expressed fairly vividly that Instagram, in particular, might evolve in a way that would become a threat to Facebook at the time. That there would be a migration, inevitably, and it would happen fast. I suppose a key question in the court's mind is going to be which one predominates. What was the principal aim that the company had in mind in carrying out the acquisitions? And another question for the court is, is Meta's state of mind in 2012 relevant to deciding the case today? Part of what I think Mark Zuckerberg has been arguing in these first few days is, 'We did a good job with them. If the government's thought was that we were trying to bury them. And to take them off the field so that they would not disrupt at all, we didn't do that.' The FTC argues that Meta has a monopoly in the market that they refer to as 'personal social networking' and that its only real competitors are Snapchat and a smaller app called MeWe. Meta's lawyer is claiming that this definition is way too narrow. Do you think the lawyer has a point? Meta is going to have a fruitful issue here to work with. Judge James Boasberg, in November of last year, wrote a decision in which he leads off on the second page with a caution saying, 'Just because, FTC, you have lived to fight another day in this matter does not mean you're going to prevail.' And the issues that he comes back to through the opinion include the proper definition of the market. So the judge clearly has a lot of questions about that. And, I suspect, Meta will take a lot of care to try and reinforce those doubts. To say that even if these other services are not perfect substitutes for the personal social network service that we offer, they're pretty damn good alternatives and the overlap is significant enough, and that overlap is changing over time in ways that you can't draw a confident conclusion that Meta has monopoly power in the niche that the FTC is trying lay out. The question on everybody's mind is whether this could lead to Meta being broken up. If you were a gambling man, what odds would you be betting on? I guess I'd at least bet the price of a double espresso, maybe with a muffin thrown in, too. So high-stakes gambling, to be sure. But, if Judge Boasberg is sold on the FTC's theory of harm and ultimately says, 'I had doubts, but they convinced me. I wasn't seeing it, but they helped me see it,' that elevates a divestiture dramatically up the list of possibilities. The real issue will be whether he issues an opinion that says, 'You sold me on some of this, but it's a really close call. And I am not so persuaded that the competitive harm was so dramatic that I have to take this drastic step.' If you imagine it being a match in which we're counting goals, and the match is an 8-0 win for the plaintiff, the judge is probably more inclined to impose a more dramatic remedy. But if it's a close match, I think judges have been more inclined to say, 'Do I really need this form of more dramatic market intervention to cure the problem?' In that instance, there's more of a willingness to look for other solutions. In the lead up to this trial, Mark Zuckerberg made a number of trips to the White House and the Wall Street Journal reported that in those meetings he lobbied President Trump for a settlement in this case. Could Trump realistically step in before this trial is over? Indeed, he could. Would he? I think we see conflicting impulses. One concern that the president might have is that this kind of dramatic intervention is not necessary or helpful. That a big-bang remedy is not the right way to do things [and] that Meta is making a number of accommodating gestures and will still make more. On the other hand, we know that [FTC Chair] Andrew Ferguson was in the White House, too, and met with the president. And I suspect part of the conversation had to do with more conventional antitrust theories of harm, what the market might have looked at had it not been for these acquisitions. I suspect the discussion also focused on the kinds of deeply felt concerns that the president has about whether or not Meta helped turn the election against him in 2020. That the reason to be concerned about their size and market presence, their dominance, is that they dominate not only the economic sphere, they have an outsized influence in the political sphere. And they had it and they used it against you. 'And don't forget that, Mr. President.' And to the extent that you want a little bit of retribution here, here's your chance to get it. Subscribe to POLITICO Tech on Apple , Spotify , Audible or your preferred podcast player.
Politico
10-04-2025
- Business
- Politico
‘Essentially, trade stops': A former Trump official on what's next for China
After days of stock market mayhem, President Donald Trump pulled back most of the reciprocal tariffs he slapped on U.S. trade partners on Wednesday. But not China. Trump upped his levy on China to a whopping 125 percent — the latest shot in a rapidly escalating trade war. Trade expert Nazak Nikakhtar has been watching the escalation with concern, and offered her download on the risks for businesses — and for Trump — on the POLITICO Tech podcast . A former Commerce Department official during Trump's first term, Nikakhtar now chairs the national security practice at law firm Wiley. She explains the ways in which the tech industry is vulnerable to Beijing's retaliation, and why the economic pain from these sky-high tariffs may be necessary. The following excerpt of the conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Listen to the full interview on POLITICO Tech, available on Apple , Spotify , Audible or your preferred podcast player. Can you kind of wrap your head around how dramatically this has escalated? A month ago, two months ago, people in the United States [and] around the world, would have thought it was unfathomable to get to tariff rates that high with China. Because over my almost 25 years dealing with trade with China, specifically, once you get into high double digits, essentially trade stops. China will just pull back and really focus on other markets. And so this really is forcing a decoupling. It's our high tariff rates, China's counter-tariff rates, and China's export restrictions to the United States. And the reason the export restrictions are pretty severe is that China knows exactly where to hit to have maximum impact. And where they decided to focus their export restrictions are, really, the nuts and bolts that our manufacturing sector needs, and the manufacturing sector supports the economy. So in a nutshell, it's getting pretty ugly. There are obviously tech companies like Apple and Nvidia that make a lot of products in China or sell them there. How hard could those companies be hit, do you think? The Chinese Government is going to threaten them unless they use their influence on the U.S. government to walk the U.S. government back, or it's just going to go after them directly so that those companies are going to have no choice but to advocate to the U.S. government. 'Look, I'm going to lose all this revenue and I'm going to collapse if I'm not allowed to do business there.' And, you know, to be honest with you, the government has now heard this narrative so much. It's almost, almost, becoming immune to it. … The U.S. government can only be sympathetic for so long. And frankly, I think the Trump administration is kind of expecting businesses, like you've had eight years to understand that I'm not going to protect your financial interests by not going after China to protect our national security interests. The president took tariffs off a bunch of countries because he said they've shown an eagerness to come to the negotiating table. Is it possible for China to still get that treatment? The president is going to be very open [to] negotiating with China, even though the president and, frankly, all of the U.S. government leaders have been burned by China. China has just really never adhered to any of its deals. I think the president still wants to figure out how to get a deal with China where China is going to comply. I don't think China wants a deal. President Xi Jinping is a different person than he was in 2018. I think he's consolidated power. He's indigenized high-tech capabilities, including semiconductors, AI, etc. He's almost at the end of his unprecedented third term looking for a fourth. … He pretty much knows something we don't know, which is they don't really need the American economy as much as we think that they do. As you look ahead, do you think Donald Trump or Xi Jinping is in the more comfortable position here? I don't know who's in a more comfortable position. Xi Jinping has the facts to maybe be in a more comfortable position. I mean, we just saw the stock market, right? A little bit of pain and the economy goes berserk. So I think a little bit of the disconnect is that the president, I think, thinks that he has a little bit more cards than he does. He has some. But I think he's overestimating the hand that he has. The American economy just is not willing to withstand even a day of pain. Now, does China have some weaknesses, too? It's the rest of the world slowly potentially starting to turn their back on China. But I don't think Xi Jinping cares. Trump is going to care a little bit more than Xi Jinping does and really does want a deal. But he's going to want to deal on his terms and he's going to want a deal from his position of power, and Xi Jinping is not going to give it to him. Subscribe to POLITICO Tech on Apple , Spotify , Audible or your preferred podcast player.
Politico
03-04-2025
- Business
- Politico
Will Big Tech actually benefit from Trump's trade war?
With Wall Street in a panic and allies the world over peeved, the global fallout from President Donald Trump's sweeping trade war continues to build. But the world's richest companies could see some upside — depending on how Trump negotiates. From the sale of TikTok, to digital services taxes, to Europe's pesky antitrust action against Silicon Valley behemoths, tech issues have suddenly become a potential bargaining chip in Trump's tariff fight. And Silicon Valley executives, newly cozy with the president, are hoping his administration will defend them against foreign regulations and taxes . So as countries negotiate to ease tariffs, they're faced with a question: What exactly does Trump want? And should they scale back their own laws to make him happy? This all depends on whether Trump has a coherent plan, Michael Froman, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, told the POLITICO Tech podcast . 'Leverage is only good if you take it out for a drive,' he said. 'You've got to be able to lay out for the other countries, for the other markets what it is you want them to change, or do, in order to reduce the tariffs, get rid of the tariffs,' said Froman, who served as the U.S. trade representative under President Barack Obama. 'And so far, the administration has not laid that out in any great detail.' Trump stood in the Rose Garden on Wednesday and declared a 10 percent tariff on all countries . He then slapped extra tariffs on trade partners who he said treat the U.S. unfairly, including the European Union, China and Taiwan. On POLITICO Tech, Froman delves into the implications of Trump's 'Liberation Day' and whether it will set Silicon Valley free with host Steven Overly. Listen to the full interview and subscribe to POLITICO Tech on Apple , Spotify , Audible or your preferred podcast player.
Politico
14-03-2025
- Business
- Politico
5 questions for author Catherine Bracy
With help from Alfred Ng Happy Friday, and welcome to The Future in 5 Questions. This week we talk with Catherine Bracy, a civic technologist and CEO of the advocacy group TechEquity whose new book, 'World Eaters: How Venture Capital Is Cannibalizing the Economy,' is getting attention for its provocative argument that the structure of venture capital – the financial engine of the tech industry — has a distorting effect not just on companies and their values, but on American society overall. With Elon Musk currently running a startup-style disruption playbook on the federal government itself, she talks to DFD about the puzzling opacity of private tech giants, how 'moneyball for startups' could improve the economy — and the very disappointing device in her pocket. (You can also hear her on this recent POLITICO Tech podcast.) This interview has been condensed and edited. What is one underrated big idea right now? I would say, something like moneyball for venture capital. Technology itself is valueless, and the thing that gives it its potential to do harm or to create opportunity is the economic structure in which it's created. People should know that the way that investors are incentivizing their companies is to be the biggest they can possibly be, because that's how they create the financial return that they have promised to investors. The playbook for doing that is a bulldozer effect. Speed is goal, not efficiency. I think we see that with the way that Elon is moving — sledgehammer, not scalpel. That's a strategy. It's not a mistake. And all the fallout from that is a cost that is borne by the rest of us. So those companies skirt regulations. They exploit workers. They ship products that aren't good enough or that, you know, have risks to the customer. They do rugpulls. It attracts grifters. I came to believe, by the end of my research, that we were missing out on a ton of great innovation and financial gain by ignoring companies that were only kind of naturally able to hit doubles or triples instead of grand slams. And that in areas like housing and other areas of the economy that I care a lot about, either they were ignoring the right solutions, or they were forcing some of those companies to shape-shift. And that was because the investors are chasing power law returns, I think, to the detriment of the economy. What is a technology that you think is overhyped? Well, that's the thing about VC — everything is overhyped, right? It's like that joke: You can be underwhelmed, or you can be overwhelmed, but you can never be like, appropriately whelmed. And I feel like that's true in VC. Nothing is ever appropriately hyped. But if I'm giving my cheeky answer, I would say I have been really disappointed with the iPhone. I've been an Android girl since day one. I got my first Google phone in 2008, and I've been on Android ever since, and then my friend group shamed me into getting an iPhone so that I would no longer be a green bubble. And I came in thinking this was going to be like, so much better. And it's so much worse. So my spicy take is that the iPhone is really overhyped. What could the government be doing in regard to technology that it is not? I've actually got two answers to this. The first answer is to force more transparency for private capital markets and private companies. I think it's kind of a farce at this stage that companies that are as large and valuable and critical to the financial system as Stripe or OpenAI don't have the same reporting requirements as companies that are much smaller, but in the public markets. And then on the tech policy side, where I do my day job, we're working on a lot of regulation in California to set standards around the deployment and development of AI. A lot of the stuff that we're worried about AI doing in the world is actually already illegal, or there are laws to enforce that behavior, but they're very difficult to enforce when AI is perpetrating them. So we need to properly resource enforcement agencies, empower enforcement agencies and breathe life into them so that there are real, practical methods for people to enforce their rights against AI. What book most shaped your conception of the future? I've been thinking a lot since the election, and about what kind of economic system we will build after whatever this is that we're living through. How do we envision something that is positive about what we can build after? The first thing I did was kind of try to ground myself in history, and so 'The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order,' by Gary Gerstle, has been very helpful in thinking through the grand sweep of how economic systems are created and political economies spring up around them, and what that means for how we got to where we are now, but also what it means for what we might build in the future. And I have found a lot of solace in the very optimistic and heartfelt vision that Natalie Foster laid out in her book 'The Guarantee,' which really points out that, while we think about these things — this sort of utopian idea of what you know, how the abundance economy could work for everybody — there are things we have already accomplished over the last 10 years that point us in the right direction. And then it's not all just fantasy and imagination. What surprised you the most this year? I feel like the cliche answer is the election results. Now, I feel like I shouldn't be surprised by anything. But I've been a little bit surprised by how transparent the Silicon Valley right has been about their goals and methodologies. Elon Musk is nakedly blitz-scaling his way across the federal government, and it's just a very literal interpretation of Silicon Valley's methodology as brought to government. I thought they would be more subtle about that. Maybe I shouldn't have been as surprised as I was. But, you know, here we are. HUAWEI BANNED The Chinese tech giant Huawei's lobbyists are banned from the European Parliament's premises until authorities wrap up a bribery investigation into the company. POLITICO EU's Max Griera reported Friday that Huawei is at the center of a corruption scandal linked to its lobbying in Brussels. The company had nine people registered to enter the European Parliament according to its most recent records in October, and the ban applies to all of the government's premises. Authorities so far have raided 21 addresses in Brussels, Flanders, Wallonia and Portugal, and made several arrests. CALIFORNIA'S PRIVACY COP GETS A NEW CHIEF The California Privacy Protection Agency announced a new executive director: Tom Kemp, a Silicon Valley-based investor who has advocated for the state's privacy regulations in the past. POLITICO's Tyler Katzenberger reported exclusively in today's California Decoded that the tech entrepreneur will lead the agency starting on April 1. He will replace Ashkan Soltani, who left in January. In his Q&A, Kemp said he wants to help Californians exercise their privacy rights, saying there's a disconnect between people worried about their data privacy and people taking action to protect it. POST OF THE DAY THE FUTURE IN 5 LINKS Stay in touch with the whole team: Derek Robertson (drobertson@ Mohar Chatterjee (mchatterjee@ Steve Heuser (sheuser@ Nate Robson (nrobson@ Daniella Cheslow (dcheslow@ and Christine Mui (cmui@
