The current trial between the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Meta is not limited to a debate on economic concentration. It highlights a deeper transformation: the progressive enslavement of the user at the service of a relentless advertising logic.
Sheryl Sandberg, former META operations director, was called upon to testify this week as part of the FTC trial for abuse of dominant position. She must have answered a past that Meta prefers to relegate to the rank of success story: the acquisition of Instagram in 2012, then WhatsApp in 2014. The FTC now estimates that these acquisitions allowed the company to lock the social networks market and suffocate any competition.
But beyond market logics, it is the evolution of the user experience that is found on the dock. The heart of the FTC argument is based on a simple observation: users have not left Instagram or WhatsApp after these acquisitions, No because they were satisfied, but because they had nowhere to go.
User inertia, revealing a monopoly
During his testimony, Sandberg was faced with a presentation of the Meta board of directors dating from March 2018, in the midst of crisis Cambridge Analytica. The internal document revealed a significant drop in the user satisfaction indicator – but no drop in engagement indicators. The FTC sees it as proof of a monopolistic power: An unhappy consumer who remains captive for lack of alternative.
For the agency, it was this inertia that paved the way for a deliberate deterioration in the quality of the services. The trial does not aim to demonstrate a collapse of use, but An insidious degradation of experience: more advertisements, reduced confidentiality, and an increasingly oriented platform towards the needs of advertisers.
Monetization, step by step
Meta has never hidden her strategy: make her platforms of precision advertising machines. By buying Instagram and WhatsApp, the company has expanded its perimeter of collection of behavioral data, while strengthening its dependence on a model based on the prediction of intentions.
The FTC criticizes Meta in particular for changing the rules of the game afterwards. WhatsApp, bought with the promise of reinforced confidentiality, has seen its conditions of use evolve. Major changes were imposed in 2016, then in 2021, without users having a real alternative. For the Commission, Meta’s hands in the hands has not only reduced competition, but also deprived users of truly enlightened choices.
A logic of extinction of competition
In an internal communication of July 2011, Sandberg wrote about Google+: ” This is the first time that we have had real competition and consumers have a real choice. The following year, in an exchange with Mark Zuckerberg, she added about Google: ” I WOULD Block Google. »»
These elements, presented by the FTC, aim to demonstrate that META has systematically sought to neutralize its competitors – not by technical superiority, but by commercial asphyxiation. Discriminating advertising practices, such as the refusal to disseminate announcements promoting competing services, are part of the file.
Network effects at the service of opacity
The trial also reveals how The economy of surveillance prosperous on network effects made opaque. The more the users remain captive, the more the harvested data is rich, the more difficult the ecosystem becomes. This capture feeds increasingly efficient algorithms in the prediction of behavior, strengthening dependence and digging the gap with possible challengers.
The FTC thus tries to reverse the logic long defended by Meta: that of a perpetual competition market. According to the agency, The lack of credible alternatives and the voluntary degradation of quality are the two sides of the same dominant power.
At the heart of the trial: the quality sacrificed for profitability
In filigree, it is a wider question that emerges: that of the link between market concentration and deterioration of user interest. Meta’s economic model is based on an implicit compromise:Free access in exchange for intensive attention and personal data monetization. But this compromise is no longer one if the conditions of use change unilaterally and that the exit options disappear.
By pushing the case in court, the FTC is not only looking to break two emblematic acquisitions. She calls into question aPrivacy industrialization modelbecome hegemonic, and supported by a service infrastructure that has become essential.
This trial is not only that of Meta, but that of a system where free masks the absence of choice, and where growth is based on the silent exploitation of preferences, relationships and habits. In this sense, he questions the very sustainability of the surveillance economy. I invite you to read my hard reset on this subject, and if we regulated social networks as we regulated tobacco?
