Lauren Feiner

The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals vacated a preliminary injunction that prevented the law from taking effect while the lower court hears arguments on the merits. The district court didn’t adequately analyze the full scope of platforms the law could apply to, the appeals court says, as required under the Supreme Court’s ruling in an earlier set of cases brought by tech industry group NetChoice.

Meta and the FTC point to different parts of Google’s filings to international regulators to reinforce their views of the market. In an Australian filing where Google was attempting to avoid a social media probe, it stated that even though digital products can have overlapping audiences, “there are a number of use cases that only social media platforms such as Facebook can satisfy.” It earlier told European regulators that it competes with social networks for users.

The FTC presents Filner with a post-mortem document about YouTube’s 2014-2019 experiment with adding social features, such as in-app messaging. “We learned that taking a page from social apps and bluntly asking for contact access in the YouTube app would likely lead to user backlash and rejection,” the document reads. “Users who probably hadn’t batted an eyelash about providing their contacts to Snapchat didn’t see YouTube as a relevant app to share contacts with.”

Filner is currently a senior director of product management at YouTube. The FTC appears to be attempting to demonstrate that YouTube serves a distinct market from Meta’s apps and is not a direct competitor in the “personal social networking” market it has defined for this case.

Goetz says the $19 billion deal was reasonable because, like other companies that get acquired early on, “it looks like a high price, but with the benefit of time, it’s very clear that these young private companies had the potential to emerge into independent public companies.” The FTC has contended that Meta was willing to pay what it did because it was trying to get a potential competitor off the market.

Goetz is supporting Zuckerberg’s earlier characterization of the WhatsApp founders’ “disdain” for advertising and adding social features. He says that, before WhatsApp was acquired, Sequoia partners suggested launching a new app with social media features as a potential business model, but the founders wouldn’t have it. “We were quickly shot down and dismissed,” Goetz recalls. “They were very clear.”