It’s still unclear how much President-elect Joe Biden’s administration will embrace the changing zeitgeist. In February, the FTC announced that it had issued investigative subpoenas to Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and Google’s parent Alphabet, demanding information on 10 years’ worth of mergers, as part of a study into acquisitions of startups. The commission has shown signs earlier this year that it is taking a new look at tech industry transactions that it had originally deemed too small to warrant its scrutiny.
He added, “At the same time, the FTC previously cleared both the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions, and I hesitate to congratulate it now for trying to clean up its own mess.” Mike Lee (R-Utah) said in a statement Wednesday about what he called the FTC’s “belated” lawsuit. “I am glad to see that our antitrust enforcers are finally taking the threats posed by Big Tech seriously,” Sen. “The merger has to be evaluated based on the facts in 2012 when it happened.”Įven some lawmakers who support the FTC’s Facebook suit expressed bemusement about the agency’s 180-degree shift in its thinking toward the WhatsApp and Instagram deals. “The FTC’s case has to be built on more than just regret,” said Limarzi, who joined the law firm Gibson Dunn last year. Facebook is already disputing that argument. “It’s just a complete one-eighty,” said Newman, now an antitrust professor at the University of Miami School of Law.įirst though, the FTC and states will have to convince a federal judge that Instagram and WhatsApp would have been as successful as they are today even if Facebook had never bought them, said Kristen Limarzi, who spent 11 years as a DOJ antitrust lawyer.
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Back then, “people were out there making the claim that when a market is free there can’t be harm to consumers and antitrust doesn’t apply.” “The legal and political environment around antitrust in Big Tech is super different now” from 2012, said John Newman, who spent three years as an antitrust prosecutor at the Justice Department. But people following the issue say the Facebook suits could pave the way for more of these kinds of challenges. That “legal revolution,” as one antitrust expert called it, has yet to be tested in court. The FTC has also challenged two other recent proposed deals, one involving pharmaceuticals and the other DNA-sequencing technology, that it alleged were intended to cut off competition that didn’t yet exist. And when you're on set, making something like this, you're like, it's hilarious," she explained.This week’s antitrust suits against Facebook by the FTC and dozens of state attorneys general came a month after the Justice Department went to court to block Visa from buying a financial data startup called Plaid - on the grounds that, much like Facebook, the credit card giant is trying to neutralize a rising competitor by buying it. I've known Gene for years, and he's the funniest person I've ever met in my life.
"I mean, I think it is as funny as it is because it's really pushing the envelope, and really inappropriate and raunchy. They want Maddie to "date" their son, Percy (Feldman), a socially awkward 19-year-old who has so far expressed no interest in girls, parties or other teenage exploits.Īs for what drew her to the film, Lawrence said being able to "push the envelope" in terms of the film's hilariously inappropriate moments was part of it. Lawrence kept things equally light-hearted in her new, raunchy comedy, which sees the Oscar-winner as Maddie, a reckless 20-something who answers a Craigslist ad placed by a pair of concerned parents, played by Laura Benanti and Matthew Broderick.
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