Meta’s expert Professor Carlton argued last week that the court should consider which apps users turn to when Facebook and Instagram aren’t available, like during its 2021 outage. In that case and in his own experiment, users turned to TikTok and YouTube more than Snapchat, even though that’s the app included in the FTC’s market definition. Hemphill says this is a flawed argument against Meta’s monopoly power because it shows users diverted their time to apps that even its own experts would likely agree don’t “plausibly belong in the market,” like Google Chrome and Candy Crush. “This is an illustration of the problems that result when you pursue this kind of gotcha approach,” he says.