{"id":127395,"date":"2025-04-17T15:16:28","date_gmt":"2025-04-17T15:16:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/?p=127395"},"modified":"2025-04-17T15:16:28","modified_gmt":"2025-04-17T15:16:28","slug":"how-metas-antitrust-case-could-dampen-ai-development","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/?p=127395","title":{"rendered":"How Meta\u2019s antitrust case could dampen AI development"},"content":{"rendered":"

Source: Cointelegraph.com NewsMeta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, is facing antitrust proceedings that could limit its ability to develop AI amid a field of competitors.
\nFirst filed in 2021, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleges that Meta\u2019s strategy of absorbing firms \u2014 rather than competing with them \u2014 violates antitrust laws. If the court rules against Meta, it could be forced to spin out its various messenger services and social media sites into independent companies.
\nThe loss of its stable of social media companies could harm Facebook\u2019s competitiveness not only in the social media industry but also in its ability to train and develop its proprietary Llama AI models with data from those sites.
\nThe trial could take anywhere from a couple of months to a year, but the outcome will have lasting consequences on Meta\u2019s standing in the AI race.
\nMeta\u2019s antitrust case and its effect on AI
\nThe FTC first opened its complaint against Meta in 2020 when the firm was still operating as Facebook. The agency\u2019s amended complaint a year later alleges that Meta (then Facebook) used an illegal \u201cbuy-or-bury\u201d scheme on more creative competitors after its \u201cfailed attempts to develop innovative mobile features for its network.\u201d This resulted in a monopoly of the \u201cfriends and family\u201d social media market.
\nMeta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg had the chance to address these allegations on April 14, the first day of the official FTC v. Meta trial. He testified that only 20% of user content on Facebook and some 10% on Instagram was generated by users\u2019 friends. The nature of social media has changed, Zuckerberg claimed.
\n\u201cPeople just kept on engaging with more and more stuff that wasn\u2019t what their friends were doing,\u201d he said \u2014 meaning that the nature of Meta\u2019s social media holdings was sufficiently diverse.
\nThe FTC alleges that Meta identified potential threat competitors and bought them up. Source: FTCAt the time of the FTC\u2019s initial complaint, Meta called the allegations \u201crevisionist history,\u201d a claim it repeated on April 13 when it stated the agency was \u201cignoring reality.\u201d The company has argued that the purchases of Instagram and WhatsApp have benefited users and that competition has appeared in the form of YouTube and TikTok.\u00a0
\nIf the District of Columbia Circuit Court rules against Meta, the global social media giant will be forced to unwind these services into independent firms. Jasmine Enberg, vice president and principal analyst at eMarketer, told the Los Angeles Times that such a ruling could cost Meta its competitive edge in the social media market.
\n\u201cInstagram really is its biggest growth driver, in the sense that it has been picking up the slack for Facebook for a long time, especially on the user front when it comes to young people,\u201d said Enberg. \u201cFacebook hasn\u2019t been where the cool college kids hang out for a long time.\u201d
\nSuch a ruling would also affect the pool of data from which Meta can draw to train its AI models. In July 2024, Meta halted the rollout of AI models in the European Union, citing \u201cregulatory uncertainty.\u201d\u00a0
\nThe pause came after privacy advocacy group None of Your Business filed complaints in 11 European countries against Meta\u2019s use of public data from its platforms to train its AI models. The Irish Data Protection Commission subsequently ordered a pause on the practice until it could conduct a review.\u00a0
\nRelated: Meta\u2019s Llama 4 puts US back in lead to \u2018win the AI race\u2019 \u2014 David Sacks
\nOn April 14, Meta got the go-ahead to use public data \u2014 i.e., posts and comments from adult users across all of its platforms \u2014 to train the model. If these firms dissolved into separate companies, with their own organizational structures and data protection policies and practices, Meta would be cut off from an ocean of data and human communication with which its AI could be improved.\u00a0
\nAndrew Rossow, a cyberspace attorney with Minc Law and CEO of AR Media Consulting, told Cointelegraph that in such an event, \u201ccompanies would most likely control their own user data, and Meta would be restricted from using it unless new data-sharing agreements were negotiated, which would be subject to regulatory scrutiny and user\/consumer privacy laws.\u201d
\nHowever, Rossow noted that it wouldn\u2019t be a total loss for Meta. Zuckerberg\u2019s firm would retain the wealth of data from Facebook and Messenger. It could continue to use \u201copt-in\u201d data from consumers who allow their posts to be used for AI training, and it could also employ synthetic data sets as well as third-party and open data.
\nMeta, the AI race and data protections
\nThe race to unseat OpenAI and its ChatGPT model from AI dominance has grown more competitive in the last year as DeepSeek joined the fray and Meta launched the fourth iteration of its open-source Llama model.\u00a0
\nIn addition to training new models, major AI development firms are investing billions in new data centers to accommodate new iterations. In January 2025, Meta announced the construction of a 2-gigawatt data center with more than 1.3 million Nvidia AI graphics processing units.\u00a0
\nZuckerberg wrote in a post on Threads, \u201cThis will be a defining year for AI. In 2025, I expect Meta AI will be the leading assistant serving more than 1 billion people […] To power this, Meta is building a 2GW+ datacenter that is so large it would cover a significant part of Manhattan.\u201d
\nIllustration of the data map coverage. Source: Mark ZuckerbergHis announcement followed the $500-billion Stargate project, which would see massive investment in AI development led by OpenAI and SoftBank, with Microsoft and Oracle as equity partners.\u00a0
\nRelated: Trump announces $500B AI infrastructure venture \u2018Stargate\u2019
\nAmid this competition, AI firms are looking for broader and more varied sources of data to train their AI models \u2014 and have turned to dubious practices in order to get the data they need. In order to stay competitive with OpenAI when developing its Llama 3 model, Meta harvested thousands of pirated books from the site LibGen. According to court documents in a case pending against Meta, Llama developers harvested data from pirated books because licensing them from sources like Scribd seemed \u201cunreasonably expensive.\u201d\u00a0
\nTime was another perceived motivator for using pirated works. \u201cThey take like 4+ weeks to deliver data,\u201d one engineer wrote about services through which they could purchase book licenses.
\nThe practice is not limited to Meta. OpenAI has also been accused of mining data from pirated work hosted on LibGen.\u00a0
\nRossow suggested that, \u201cto ensure lasting impact \u2014 beyond short-term profit,\u201d Meta would do well to \u201cprioritize investment in advanced data collection, rigorous auditing and the implementation of privacy-preserving and encryption-based technologies.\u201d
\nBy focusing on transparency and responsible practices, \u201cMeta can continue to genuinely advance AI capabilities, rebuild and nurture long-term user trust, and adapt to evolving legal and ethical standards, regardless of changes to its platform portfolio.\u201d
\nWhat a ruling for the FTC would mean
\nLitigation is now hitting tech firms from all sides as they face allegations of privacy violations, copyright law infringement and stifling competition. Major cases like those facing Google, Amazon and Meta that have yet to play out will decide how and whether these firms can proceed as they have, defining the guardrails for AI development as well.\u00a0
\nRossow said that the current antitrust case against Meta could decide how courts interpret antitrust law for tech firms, spanning tech mergers, data usage and market competition. It would also signal that courts are \u201cwilling to break up tech conglomerates\u201d when issues of smothering competition are involved, while at the same time, \u201ctaking current precedent a step further in harmonizing it with the laws of cyberspace.\u201d
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Source: Cointelegraph.com NewsMeta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, is facing antitrust proceedings that could limit its ability to develop AI amid a field of competitors. First… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127395"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=127395"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/127395\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=127395"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=127395"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/cryptospotters.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=127395"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}