FTC v. Meta: the antitrust battle over Instagram and WhatsApp
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Boasberg asks Hemphill to explain why the way users choose to spend their time when one app is down wouldn’t be relevant to show which apps are substitutes. “In fact, why isn’t that the best indicator about what is a substitute?” he adds. This is exactly the argument Meta’s made since the first day of trial: that users spending more time on Instagram after TikTok’s brief pre-ban shutdown shows users see it as a viable alternative.
Hemphill says the TikTok outage is “extremely problematic from the standpoint of trying to understand monopoly power.” First, it’s the wrong way around, and how users behaved during a Facebook outage is more useful. But even then, he says, the brief and complete outages tell us little about good market substitutes.
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