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Mark Zuckerberg personally lost the Facebook antitrust case

Today's links - Mark Zuckerberg personally lost the Facebook antitrust case: A folder on his desktop called "mens rea." - Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. - Object permanence: 2005, 2010, 2015, 2020, 2024 - Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.

It's hard to prove why a company does anything, unless its CEO, founder, and holder of the majority of its voting stock explicitly states that his strategy is to create a system to ensure that innovating new products "won't get much traction" because he'll be able to quickly copy them. So we have Zuck starving Insta of development except when he needs to neutralize a competitor, which is just another way of saying he set out to reduce the quality of the product after acquisition, a thing that is statutorily prohibited, but hard to prove (again, unless you confess to it in writing, herp derp). If you want to see the things you've explicitly asked for – posts from accounts you follow – you have to tolerate a certain amount of "boosted content" and ads, that is, stuff that Facebook's business customers will pay to nonconsensually cram into your eyeballs.

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