The experiment that broke the FTC’s case against Meta

When U.S. District Judge James Boasberg ruled in Meta’s favor in the FTC's antitrust case last November (see my analysis here), his primary contention was that the "personal social networking" (PSN) market defined by the FTC in the case proved too narrow to be relevant for asserting monopoly power, given that it only included Facebook, […]

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Comments:

Anonymous Hedgehog 5752 Jan 8, 2026 8:58 pm

If consumer attention and consumer dollars are basically fungible across these platforms....shouldn't advertising performance be pretty close to fungible too? Similar users, similar spend...Is MMM type analysis going to look at them all as basically the same?

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Eric Jan 8, 2026 9:01 pm

Different platforms have different capabilities. Compare the sophistication of Meta's platform to that of Pinterest's or Snap's. The core use case of the product may attract users independent of how well the ad platform monetizes their attention.

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