In the midst of Donald Trump’s tariff chaos, prices are rising at retailers like Walmart, Amazon, and Home Depot, according to data provided to The Verge by Bright Data, which tracks prices week over week. As of May 11th, for example, 21.5 percent of the 1.5 million tracked Amazon products had increased in price. Check out an interactive chart here.
After about four days of witness testimony in its case-in-chief, and on the sixth week of trial, Meta concludes its defense. The FTC plans to put on its rebuttal case on Tuesday, where it plans to call back its economic expert Scott Hemphill to respond to Meta’s experts.
Even though Carlton says Instagram has been such a “grand slam home run” that it’s hard to imagine it doing even better without Meta, the FTC points to past markets where output increased even while plagued by a monopolist. It pulls up a slide used by the Justice Department in its antitrust case against Google, showing that global PC shipments increased while Microsoft dominated, with similar trends for long distance calls during AT&T’s monopoly, and global crude oil production at the height of Standard Oil’s power. Carlton says that anything is possible and “the moon could fall out of the sky tomorrow, but if you’re asking me if its likely that output would be higher in the but-for world, the answer would be no.”
If market players knew what Instagram would come to be worth in the years after Meta’s acquisition, the deal could have fetched a price at least 40 times more than the $1 billion it got at the time, Carlton testifies. “I just see no basis for making this assumption that Instagram in the but-for world would have been even better,” he says.
Carlton performed a regression analysis to show that the FTC’s theory that Meta charges users interested in friend content a higher price through ads does not bear out. There’s “no systematic positive relationship between ad load and number of friends,” he concludes. In fact, he found, younger users who spend a larger percentage of time on Facebook ad Instagram on friends and family sharing receive fewer ads than older users who spend a smaller portion of their time on such content.
In the past two years, Carlton says the amount of time US users spend on “friend” content on Instagram has declined from 11 percent to 7 percent. As of January, US Instagram users spent 51 percent of their time on the app on Reels. When Instagram has experimented with reducing users’ access to Reels, he says, time spent on the app goes down. Those who had full access to the short-form videos overall spent less time on Feed and Stories, which the FTC has said is associated with friend content that doesn’t compete with TikTok and YouTube.
Competition from TikTok and YouTube is really what keeps it at bay, Carlton testifies. He points to a chart Meta showed in its opening arguments demonstrating that a greater portion of Meta users went to those two apps than Snapchat during its 2021 outage. Ignoring this reality, Carlton says, “that’s just missing the boat. It’s just understating the importance of these very important influences on Meta’s behavior.”
Carlton is baffled how FTC expert Hemphill could say users would have been better off had Meta never bought Instagram in WhatsApp. Instagram, he says, “exceeded the expectations that people had at the time of acquisition, so to say that it would have been even better — how can you say that?” With WhatsApp, he adds, Meta actually lowered the price users had to pay for the service, from a dollar a year in some cases, to zero.
University of Chicago professor Dennis Carlton is up next. Carlton’s testimony will attempt to take down the analysis by the FTC’s expert witness Scott Hemphill by pulling apart his theory about the relevant market and competitors to Meta’s alleged dominance. Carlton calls Hemphill’s claims “confusing” and says he generally prefers to see “what people actually do than what people hypothesize they could do” when it comes to consumer behavior.
Boasberg ruled from the bench Tuesday denying Meta’s motion asking him to rule against the FTC even before it launched its defense case. It was something of a long-shot since the trial is already so close to the end, and Boasberg had already said he wouldn’t pause the case while weighing the motion. But the filing outlined some of the key reasons Meta thinks it should win the case, and we’re hearing these in more detail as it continues with its case-in-chief.
“We’re constantly adjusting pricing,” Target CEO Brian Cornell said during an earnings call on Wednesday, as reported by CNBC. “Some are going up, some will be reduced, but that’s an ongoing effort that takes place each and every day.”
Last week, Walmart’s CFO directly linked tariffs with the potential for price increases, sparking a warning from Trump, who told the retailer to “eat the tariffs.”
