On "Forbes Newsroom," Forbes Staff Writer Emily Baker-White discussed the FTC case against Meta in which CEO Mark Zuckerberg has taken the stand this week.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00And we are talking about the FTC under President Trump. And so there's a little bit of a political question here. We've seen the tech CEOs get closer to the administration in its second go round than its first. Is this a test for the Trump administration to prove that it can be hard on big tech and monopolies? Or what's your political analysis here?
00:24This is really tricky. The FTC historically has been an independent agency and has operated pretty independently from the White House. It doesn't matter who's president, the FTC is going to do its thing. Not so under Donald Trump, who believes that all parts of the executive branch are solely his to control.
00:42And there has been reporting that Mark Zuckerberg is hoping that he might persuade Donald Trump somehow to stand down or to order his people to stand down in this case.
00:56It's not clear whether that will happen or how it would happen, but it's just the idea that Zuckerberg may be seeking some sort of extra legal, extra judicial side deal to make this thing go away is itself a really interesting and important story. And it's not a place we've been before in antitrust.
01:15That is fascinating. There are so many questions that remain going forward. I'm wondering, what will you be watching for on day two of the trial and day three? And also, do we even know how long it will go on?
01:27Weeks, for sure. Likely longer than a month. It will be long. It will be granular. It'll be really sort of nitty gritty. Cross-examination of Zuckerberg is going to be a big moment.
01:43It's not necessarily going to be the only big moment. I think also sort of watching the political winds, watching whether Trump says anything, gets involved in sort of any public way, or whether there is some back channel that Trump is operating in.
02:00It's not clear that he is going to do anything here, but I think Zuckerberg is certainly hoping he might.
02:06Well, and if it could last for weeks and if not months, we've seen how fast the news cycle changes. So it's probably a little too soon to even guess what the president may do here.