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      Meta’s Antitrust Trial Begins as FTC Argues Company Built Social Media Monopoly

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      The tech giant went to court on Monday in an antitrust trial focused on its acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp. The case could reshape its business.The Federal Trade Commission on Monday accused Meta of creating a monopoly that squelched competition by buying start-ups that stood in its way, kicking off a landmark antitrust trial that could dismantle a social media empire that has transformed how the world connects online.In a packed courtroom in the U.S. District Court of the District of Columbia, the F.T.C. opened its first antitrust trial under the Trump administration by arguing that Meta illegally cemented a monopoly in social networking by acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp when they were tiny start-ups. Those actions were part of a “buy-or-bury strategy,” the F.T.C. said.Ultimately, the purchases coalesced Meta’s power, depriving consumers of other social networking options and edging out competition, the government said.“For more than 100 years, American public policy has insisted firms must compete if they want to succeed,” said Daniel Matheson, the F.T.C.’s lead litigator in the case, in his opening remarks. “The reason we are here is that Meta broke the deal.”“They decided that competition was too hard and it would be easier to buy out their rivals than to compete with them,” he added.The trial — Federal Trade Commission v. Meta Platforms — poses the most consequential threat to the business empire of Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s co-founder. If the government succeeds, the F.T.C. would most likely ask Meta to divest Instagram and WhatsApp, potentially shifting the way that Silicon Valley does business and altering a long pattern of big tech companies snapping up younger rivals.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      What If Mark Zuckerberg Had Not Bought Instagram and WhatsApp?

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      Meta’s antitrust trial, in which the government contends the company killed competition by buying young rivals, hinges on unknowable alternate versions of Silicon Valley history.In 2012, when Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg cut a $1 billion check to buy the photo-sharing app Instagram, most people thought he had lost his marbles.“A billion dollars of money?” joked Jon Stewart, then the host of The Daily Show. “For a thing that kind of ruins your pictures?”Mr. Stewart called the decision “really lame.” His audience — and much of the rest of the world — agreed that Mr. Zuckerberg had overpaid for an app that highlighted a bunch of photo filters.Two years later, Mr. Zuckerberg opened his wallet again when Facebook agreed to buy WhatsApp for $19 billion. Many Americans had never heard of the messaging app, which was popular internationally but was not well known in the United States.No one knew how these deals would turn out. But hindsight, it seems, is 20/20.On Monday, the government argued in a landmark antitrust trial that both acquisitions — now considered among the greatest in Silicon Valley history — were the actions of a monopolist guarding his turf. Mr. Zuckerberg, in turn, was set to contend that were it not for these deals, his company — which has been renamed Meta — would just be an afterthought in the social media landscape.Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, is set to contend in the company’s antitrust trial that were it not for buying Instagram and WhatsApp, his firm might just be an afterthought in the social media landscape.Jason Andrew for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Do the iPhone 16E and Google Pixel 9A Compare to More Expensive Models?

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      With all the talk about tariffs driving up costs, the word “cheaper” should bring comfort to just about anyone. That’s why I’m delighted to share that the cheaper smartphone from Google has arrived, a few months after Apple released a somewhat cheaper entry-level iPhone — and that both products are very good.Google this week released the Pixel 9a, the $500 sibling of its $800 flagship smartphone, the Pixel 9. It competes directly with the $600 iPhone 16e released in February, the cheaper version of Apple’s $800 iPhone 16.Both of the new phones have the staples that people care most about — great cameras, nice screens, zippy speeds, modern software and long battery life. To cut costs, they omit some fancier extras, like advanced camera features.Is it a wise idea to save some bucks, or better to spend more on the fancier phones? To find out, I strapped on a fanny pack and carried all four phones with me for the last week to run tests.The upshot: As is often the case, you get what you pay for. The $800 phones are slightly better in terms of features and performance than the cheaper versions, and the $600 iPhone is faster and has a better camera than the $500 Pixel.But more important, the cheaper Pixel and iPhone were nearly indistinguishable from their $800 counterparts in several of my tests. In some cases, like battery life, the cheaper phones were even better.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How Trump Could Make Larry Ellison the Next Media Mogul

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      For decades, Larry Ellison reveled in being the Silicon Valley executive who really knew how to have a good time. He spent as much as $200 million building a Japanese-inspired imperial villa near Palo Alto, Calif., bought the sixth-largest Hawaiian island and dated and married and divorced with never-ending zeal.Few paid much attention to exactly what his database company, Oracle, did. Sometimes, neither did Mr. Ellison. He did not show up for his keynote talk at Oracle’s annual convention in San Francisco in 2013 because he was on his yacht trying to win the America’s Cup, which he did. A biography about him was titled, “The Difference Between God and Larry Ellison: God Doesn’t Think He’s Larry Ellison.”With a fortune of $175 billion, there is not much left for Mr. Ellison to buy that would seriously dent his wallet. He broke a Florida record in 2022 when he purchased a 22-acre estate near Palm Beach — but at $173 million, the price was one-tenth of 1 percent of his wealth. He invested $1 billion in Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter that same year because, he said at the time, “it would be lots of fun.”Now 80 years old and married for the fifth or possibly the sixth time, Mr. Ellison is expanding his ambitions beyond having fun and surrounding himself with beautiful things. Following a path laid down by his friend Mr. Musk, who has at least six companies that feed off one another, Mr. Ellison also appears to be planning to grow his corporate empire.Oracle keeps emerging as a possible bidder for TikTok, the wildly popular video app that Congress has decreed needs to divest itself of its ownership by the Chinese internet company ByteDance or be banned in the United States. On Wednesday, President Trump plans to meet with top White House officials to discuss a new ownership structure for the app. The deadline for a deal is Saturday, though TikTok deadlines have come and gone before.Oracle almost became a minority owner of TikTok’s U.S. operations in 2020, along with Walmart, when concerns about the app’s data security ran rampant. A deal was negotiated where Oracle started storing the data of U.S. users on its cloud. Oracle would also own 12.5 percent of a new company, TikTok Global. The latter part, like many TikTok deals, never happened.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      U.S. Adds Export Restrictions to More Chinese Tech Firms Over Security Concerns

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      The additions included companies that are customers of Intel and Nvidia, and one firm that was the focus of a New York Times investigation last year.The Trump administration on Tuesday added 80 companies and organizations to a list of companies that are barred from buying American technology and other exports because of national security concerns.The move, which targeted primarily Chinese firms, cracks down on companies that have been big buyers of American chips from Nvidia, Intel and AMD. It also closed loopholes that Trump administration officials have long criticized as allowing Chinese firms to continue to advance technologically despite U.S. restrictions.One company added to the list, Nettrix Information Industry, was the focus of a 2024 investigation by The New York Times that showed how some Chinese executives had bypassed U.S. restrictions aimed at cutting China off from advanced chips to make artificial intelligence.Nettrix, one of China’s largest makers of computer servers that are used to produce artificial intelligence, was started by a group of former executives from Sugon, a firm that provided advanced computing to the Chinese military and built a system the government used to surveil persecuted minorities in the western Xinjiang region.In 2019, the United States added Sugon to its “entity list,” restricting exports over national security concerns. The Times investigation found that, six months later, the executives formed Nettrix, using Sugon’s technology and inheriting some of its customers. Times reporters also found that Nettrix’s owners shared a complex in eastern China with Sugon and other related companies.After Sugon was singled out and restricted by the United States, its longtime partners — Nvidia, Intel and Microsoft — quickly formed ties with Nettrix, the investigation found.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Trump’s Crypto Venture Introduces a Stablecoin

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      World Liberty Financial, the cryptocurrency company started by Donald J. Trump and his sons, announced on Tuesday that it was planning to sell a digital currency called a stablecoin, deepening the president’s financial ties to crypto as his administration relaxes enforcement of the industry.The stablecoin would be known as USD1, the company wrote in a social media post, without revealing when it would go on sale. Stablecoins, a popular form of cryptocurrency, are designed to maintain a constant value of $1, making them useful for many types of crypto transactions.“No games. No gimmicks. Just real stability,” World Liberty Financial posted on its X account.The stablecoin is the fourth digital currency that Mr. Trump and his business partners have marketed to the public over the last year. World Liberty already offers a cryptocurrency called WLFI. This month, World Liberty announced it had sold $550 million of those digital coins. A business entity linked to Mr. Trump receives a 75 percent cut of the sales.Days before his inauguration, Mr. Trump also started selling a so-called memecoin — a type of digital currency based on an online joke or a celebrity mascot. Melania Trump put her own memecoin on the market that same weekend.Mr. Trump has made aggressive forays into the crypto market as his administration eases enforcement of crypto firms and rolls back regulations. His efforts to profit from an industry he oversees amount to an enormous conflict of interest, with virtually no precedent in American history, government ethics experts have said.World Liberty’s stablecoin adds to that messy knot of business conflicts. Congress is considering legislation to regulate stablecoins that could reach Mr. Trump’s desk before the end of the year. In a speech at a crypto conference this month, Mr. Trump called for “simple, common sense rules” for stablecoins, saying they would “expand the dominance of the U.S. dollar.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      SoftBank to Buy Silicon Valley Chip Start-Up Ampere for $6.5 Billion

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      The move is a bet that Ampere’s chips can begin playing a significant role in data centers for creating artificial intelligence.SoftBank said on Wednesday that it had agreed to pay $6.5 billion for the Silicon Valley chip start-up Ampere Computing, doubling down on a bet that technology that originated in smartphones will come to dominate the world’s data centers.The deal also reflects the Japanese conglomerate’s belief that Ampere’s chips can begin to play a significant role in artificial intelligence, where Nvidia has reaped the most rewards so far.Ampere was founded eight years ago to sell chips for data centers based on technology from Arm Holdings, a British company that licenses chip designs that have powered nearly all mobile phones. SoftBank, which bought Arm in 2016, has been working to have chips based on Arm technology used more widely and for different tasks.“The future of artificial superintelligence requires breakthrough computing power,” Masayoshi Son, SoftBank’s chairman and chief executive, said in prepared remarks. “Ampere’s expertise in semiconductors and high-performance computing will help accelerate this vision, and deepens our commitment to A.I. innovation in the United States.”SoftBank said it would operate Ampere as a wholly owned subsidiary under its own name.The sale comes amid a flurry of deals and shifting alliances driven by a furious demand for the chips used to power A.I. applications such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. SoftBank, in particular, has announced a series of transactions in a bid to play a bigger role in the field.In its splashiest move to date, Mr. Son joined President Trump in January to announce an initiative called Stargate, alongside Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief, and Larry Ellison, chairman and founder of the software maker Oracle, which is Ampere’s largest investor and customer.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Oracle’s Role in TikTok’s Future Gets Capitol Hill Scrutiny

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      Top congressional aides met with Oracle on Tuesday to talk about TikTok, which faces a ban in the United States unless it is sold to a non-Chinese owner by early April.As questions continue to swirl around Washington about the future of TikTok, the name of one potential suitor for the popular video app keeps coming up: Oracle.On Tuesday, Oracle met with top aides on Capitol Hill to talk about how the U.S. tech giant, which processes and serves TikTok user data, plans to work with the Chinese-owned video app in the United States in the coming weeks, according to two people with knowledge of the meeting who weren’t authorized to speak publicly.The questions came as TikTok stares down an April 5 deadline from a federal law that prohibits its distribution in the country if it is not sold to a non-Chinese owner. TikTok’s owner is the Chinese internet company ByteDance, and its Chinese ties have raised questions about whether the app poses a national security threat in the United States.At Tuesday’s meeting, the aides also raised the topic of whether Oracle would be involved in running TikTok, after a recent Politico report that the company was in talks with the White House over a deal, one of the people said. The aides sought assurances from Oracle that any deal would comply with the law. The meeting, which was requested by aides, included staff members from the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, Speaker Mike Johnson’s office, and the House Energy and Commerce Committee, two people with knowledge of the meeting said.TikTok is facing yet another political scramble over its future. In January, President Trump delayed enforcement of the law that would ban TikTok from the United States, which passed Congress with bipartisan support and was upheld unanimously by the Supreme Court. Mr. Trump has promised to make a deal for the app to protect national security, and tapped Vice President JD Vance in February to find an arrangement to save it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More