Bytes: Week in Review — Meta's antitrust trial, Nvidia's export restraint, and Jack Dorsey's hot take on IP law
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It's been a big week for antitrust. The federal judge on Thursday ruled Google's advertising business is a monopoly. This is the second judgment against Google after its search business was ruled a monopoly last year. Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission case against Meta kicked off in court. The FTC alleges the social media giant's acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp constitute illegal anti-competitive behavior.

It's a case that's been in the works since the first Trump administration. And here to dive into what we learned in this week's proceedings is Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at The Information. The fundamental core question at play in this trial is really did Meta make these acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp in order to stifle competition? Or was there something more to it? And what I got from a lot of Mark Zuckerberg's testimony is really that Meta is trying to paint the picture that TikTok is the big competitor to Instagram.

That, you know, they're trying to paint an image that Instagram might not have even done as well as they did had Meta not acquired them. So we've seen a lot of back and forth. We've seen some emails from Mark Zuckerberg in 2018 that was kind of expressing concern about the company potentially violating antitrust laws. It just goes to show this has been a running concern for Meta for a long time.

And politically, this is an interesting case because in the time since the Trump administration first moved on this way back in his first term, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has pivoted to, I guess you could say, a much friendlier stance toward Donald Trump. He donated a million dollars to the inauguration fund. Does that seem to be having any effect?

No, in the sense that Mark Zuckerberg did donate. However, you know, the case still went to trial. And so that was part of the issue was that, you know, Zuckerberg offered this $450 million. The FTC basically said no. You know, they initially asked for $30 billion for the company to avoid the trial. Then Zuckerberg upped his offer to a billion dollars. But a billion is not quite 30. So they couldn't really come to a consensus there. And even after...

Zuckerberg made some really visible appearances along with Trump administration officials, it still hasn't resulted in the outcome that he wanted. Interestingly, just as we were starting to tape this, the headline came out about the second Google antitrust case of a judge declaring that Google is a monopoly in its advertising business. Already, a judge had determined that it has a monopoly in its

search. There's been a lot going on with antitrust. It seems to kind of be carrying over to a certain extent during this second Trump administration. I mean, when it comes to this Meta case, could we see Instagram spun off from Meta at the end of this?

It's certainly a possibility. You know, at the same time, it's been so many years they bought Instagram in 2012. So what it would pragmatically look like to unwind that kind of transaction is another huge question that I'm sure the judge is going to be considering. We'll be right back.

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Price guarantee applies to then current base monthly rate. Additional terms and conditions apply. You're listening to Marketplace Tech. I'm Megan McCarty Carino. We're back with Anita Ramaswamy, columnist at The Information.

All right, now on to how the trade war is affecting the darling of big tech, the chipmaker NVIDIA. This week, the government put more export controls on semiconductors that include NVIDIA's H2O chip, which it had been shipping to China. This was reportedly used in the models from DeepSeek.

Even though there were already export controls on its most advanced ships, it had been shipping these H2O ships to China already.

Now, NVIDIA says this move to, you know, require licensing for these chips would cost the company about five and a half billion dollars. Anita, what did you make of this? It's hugely significant for NVIDIA. The expectations that investors have out of NVIDIA stock are really sky high. So that's why the second that NVIDIA disclosed this new restriction to investors, their stock price fell 10%.

And, you know, roughly 15% of NVIDIA's revenue came from China last year. And there's also the matter of other Asian countries that also could have tariffs put on them. A lot of chips are manufactured in Taiwan, which would also not be great for NVIDIA. So all in all, it's really just not a great picture. You know, investors are expecting NVIDIA is going to increase their revenue by, I think, 55, 56% this year. That's what the Wall Street expectation is. And that is a lot.

And so any sort of nick in that story, any sort of crack or some hole that can be poked is going to have a huge impact on the stock price. And this has just kind of been a generally unsettling week in the world of chips, whether you're a chip maker, whether you use chips. I mean, semiconductors were, of course, not included in the initial rounds of tariffs, but...

This week, the administration announced that it's opening a national security investigation into chip imports that could very likely result in tariffs. I mean, what would this mean for all of the tech industry here? It would mean that...

building out AI is going to get a lot more expensive and companies are going to have to make the decision about whether or not it's worth hoarding tons of NVIDIA GPUs and whether that's actually going to create a return on investment for them. I mean, I also think there's an aspect of this that's kind of funny timing, similar to what we talked about with Meta and the FTC and the lobbying that went on there. NVIDIA actually earlier this week had pledged $500 billion saying that they were going to use that money to build their chips in the US for the first time.

And even then, the following day, we got this announcement from NVIDIA saying that there are new export restrictions being put on the company. So I think all these companies are going to see their costs go up. They're all going to be concerned about optimizing their supply chains to make sure that they're not paying a ton of money to build out AI. All right. Now we want to dip into the discourse on X, which is always a dangerous thing to do. But this is a topic that raises a lot of questions in tech. Yeah.

So last week, Twitter co-founder, former CEO Jack Dorsey started this big debate on X with a post that said, delete all IP law. We don't know exactly what he was talking about, but Anita, what might he have been talking about and how did the Internet respond?

You know, it's possible that he was talking about the data that's been used to train some of the biggest AI models in the world. You know, a lot of it has been taken from online. There are tons of lawsuits going on. There's one between the New York Times and OpenAI. And a lot of content creators and media publications have been suing for the right to their property, which they're saying is being used improperly.

One of the more notable responses was from professional ex-Gadfly and owner Elon Musk, who said he agreed with Dorsey's anti-IP law take that,

Musk also happens to own an AI company, and he's, I guess, a pretty influential guy in policymaking these days. What did you make of that? I, you know, personally wasn't too heartened by any of that discourse or that conversation just because intellectual property law is the bedrock of, you know, the Internet that we've created.

You know, it would be great for these companies to be able to use data and train their AI models without having to get permission. But at the end of the day, that's up to the courts to decide. And those laws are in place for a reason. You know, I think some of the discourse around this is just, you know, Jack Dorsey sort of saying that there are gatekeepers who are gatekeeping access to data. At the same time, if you don't have IP laws, then how will creators actually get paid? And how do you ensure that somebody who comes up with an idea is going to get compensated for that idea and not have it stolen from them?

Yeah, a lot of, you know, AI companies are arguing, some in court, that this is basically a foundational, you know, principle for the entire AI industry, kind of like Section 230 was for the, you know, kind of foundation of the Internet, that they cannot be sued for fraud.

what they are calling fair use of copyrighted materials in the training of AI. But yeah, this kind of promises to be an unfurling issue that we have not seen the last of, right? Yeah.

Yeah. And I mean, at the end of the day, it is important. I don't think we would be having a conversation a couple of years ago about the significance of this kind of conversation going down on a social media platform, but it's really important and it could have some implications for policy down the line. That was Anita Ramaswamy at The Information. This conversation was part of our Tech Week in Review segment. You can find it on our website, marketplace.org slash techbytes.

Jesus Alvarado produced this episode. Daniel Shin also produces our show. Gary O'Keefe is our engineer. Daisy Palacios is the senior producer. Kelly Silvera is our executive producer. I'm Megan McCarty Carino, and that's Marketplace Tech. This is APM. If there's one thing we know about social media, it's that misinformation is everywhere, especially when it comes to personal finance.

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