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Meta has prevailed over an existential challenge to its business that could have forced the tech giant to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp after a judge ruled that the company does not hold a monopoly in social networking. U.S. District Judge James Boasberg issued his ruling Tuesday after the historic antitrust trial wrapped up in late May. His decision follows two separate rulings that branded Google an illegal monopoly in both search and online advertising, dealing yet another regulatory blow to the tech industry that for years enjoyed nearly unbridled growth. The Federal Trade Commission continues to insist that Meta competes with the same old rivals it has for the last decade, that the company holds a monopoly among that small set, and that it maintained that monopoly through anticompetitive acquisitions, Boasberg wrote in his ruling. Whether or not Meta enjoyed monopoly power in the past, though, the agency must show that it continues to hold such power now. The Courts verdict today determines that the FTC has not done so. Meta, the FTC had argued, has maintained a monopoly by pursuing CEO Mark Zuckerbergs strategy, expressed in 2008: It is better to buy than compete. True to that maxim, Facebook has systematically tracked potential rivals and acquired companies that it viewed as serious competitive threats. During his April testimony, Zuckerberg pushed back against the FTCs contention that Facebook bought Instagram to neutralize a threat. In his line of questioning, FTC attorney Daniel Matheson repeatedly brought up emailsmany of them more than a decade oldwritten by Zuckerberg and his associates before and after the acquisition of Instagram. While acknowledging the documents, Zuckerberg has often sought to downplay the contents, saying he wrote them in the early stages of considering the acquisition and that what he wrote at the time didnt capture the full scope of his interest in the company. The FTCs complaint said Facebook also enacted policies designed to make it difficult for smaller rivals to enter the market and neutralize perceived competitive threats, just as the world shifted its attention to mobile devices from desktop computers. The social media landscape has changed so much since the FTC filed its lawsuit in 2020, Boasberg wrote, that each time the court examined Meta’s apps and competition, they changed. Two opinions to dismiss the casefiled in 2021 and 2022didn’t even mention popular social video platform TikTok. Today, it holds center stage as Meta’s fiercest rival. Quoting the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, that no man can ever step into the same river twice, Boasberg said the same is true for the online world of social media as well. The landscape that existed only five years ago, when the Federal Trade Commission brought this antitrust suit, has changed markedly. While it once might have made sense to partition apps into separate markets of social networking and social media, that wall has since broken down, he wrote. Facebook bought Instagramthen a scrappy photo-sharing app with no ads and a small cult followingin 2012. The $1 billion cash and stock purchase price was eye-popping at the time, though the deals value fell to $750 million after Facebooks stock price dipped following its initial public offering in May 2012. Instagram was the first company Facebook bought and kept running as a separate app. Up until then, Facebook was known for smaller acqui-hiresa type of popular Silicon Valley deal in which a company purchases a startup as a way to hire its talented workers, then shuts the acquired company down. Two years later, it did it again with the messaging app WhatsApp, which it purchased for $22 billion. WhatsApp and Instagram helped Facebook move its business from desktop computers to mobile devices, and to remain popular with younger generations as rivals like Snapchat (which it also tried, but failed, to buy) and TikTok emerged. However, the FTC has a narrow definition of Metas competitive market, excluding companies like TikTok, YouTube, and Apples messaging service from being considered rivals to Instagram and WhatsApp. Meta did not immediately respond to a message for comment. By Barbara Ortutay, AP technology writer
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E-Commerce
The most closely watched earnings report of the quarter is tomorrow. Thats when AI chipmaking giant Nvidia will announce its third-quarter results. Ahead of those results, Nvidia shares are currently down in Tuesday trading. But NVDA shares arent the only chip stock that is falling today. Heres which other chip companies are seeing significant stock price declines today, and the likely reason why. Chip stocks fall across the board As of the time of this writing, major chipmaking giants and the companies that supply them are seeing their share prices fall. These include: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (Nasdaq: AMD): down 5.6% Arm Holdings plc (Nasdaq: ARM): down 3.9% ASML Holding N.V. (Nasdaq: ASML): down 2.2% Broadcom Inc. (Nasdaq: AVGO): down 1.7% Intel Corporation (Nasdaq: INTC): down 2.8% Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: MU): down 5.1% NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA): down 2.8% QUALCOMM Incorporated (Nasdaq: QCOM): down 2.6% Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited (NYSE: TSM): down 2.6% The fall in chip stocks is part of a broader decline across multiple markets today. Currently, the S&P 500 is down 0.87%, the Dow is down 1%, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq is down 1.3%. Perhaps the most significant driver behind today’s market falls is the growing fear that the tech sector is in an AI bubble, and that if that bubble pops, it could send shockwaves not just through the stock markets but also through the economy. The impact of an AI bubble popping in the broader economy is part of the reason even non-AI-related stocks are down today. In addition to chip companies, other major tech players are also seeing their shares sink this morning, especially those that have a considerable amount of exposure to AI, including Microsoft Corporation (Nasdaq: MSFT), down 2.5%; Amazon.com, Inc. (Nasdaq: AMZN), down 3.2%; Alphabet Inc. (Nasdaq: GOOG), down 1%; and Meta Platforms, Inc. (Nasdaq: META), down 2.4%. Tech giants with more limited AI exposure, such as Apple, are trading relatively flat. Currently, shares in Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL) are up about a tenth of a percent. Why are chip stocks in particular focus? Chip stocks are being scrutinized by investors today for one key reason: AI chip giant Nvidia announces its third-quarter earnings for fiscal 2026 tomorrow. As Fast Company previously reported, investor expectations for those earnings are high. Nvidia previously forecast revenue of between $52.9 billion and $55 billion for the quarter. But investor consensus estimates show that most investors expect Nvidia to come in on the high end of that spectrum. A series of consensus estimates shows that investors expect Nvidia to report revenue between $54.8 billion and $55.2 billion. But, a little more than 24 hours before Nvidia reveals if it’s met investors expectations, Wall Street seems to be getting the jitters, as investors and the media increasingly question whether the AI bubble is about to burst. It is likely that if Nvidia doesn’t hit the lofty expectations many expect, it will be taken as a sign that an AI bubble is upon us. The sell-off in chip stocks this morning is likely due to investors taking some profits in case Nvidia misses its estimates. Given that Nvidia acts as a bellwether for other chip companies and the AI sector as a whole, it is no surprise that investor jitters ahead of Nvidias earnings are spilling over to the stocks of other chipmaking companies.
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E-Commerce
In his new book, Here Comes The Sun, author and activist Bill McKibben argues that were at a tipping point where solar and wind power is now cheaper to build and harness than fossil fuels. Because of that new economic reality, he argues renewable energy has the power to transform societyif only the U.S. government would listen. McKibben, who also publishes a free Substack called The Crucial Years, came on the Most Innovative Companies podcast to talk about what Bill Gates is getting wrong about climate concerns, how solar became cheaper than fossil fuels, and the importance of mobilizing senior citizens in the fight against climate change through his organization Third Act.This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. In a recent blog post, Bill Gates downgraded climate concerns as an issue of importance. What do you think of his argument? I’ve had a checkered relationship with Mr. Gates and [his views on] climate for some years. I reviewed his last book for the New York Times. He didn’t like my review, so he complained vociferously in Rolling Stone the next day in a long interview. The first thing to understand about Bill Gates is it’s not like he’s been all over this from the start. It took him until 2006, which was 18 years after Jim Hanson told us that the planet was heating up, to conclude that it was actually a real problem and not something that nature was going to solve by itself. Now he’s saying, “Let’s don’t worry too much about it because we should be working on other things instead.” The best interpreter of his letter was of course the President of the United States who quite succinctly on Truth Social announced that Bill Gates says climate change is a hoax. It’s not quite what he said, but for all intents and purposes he might as well have. I’m afraid it’s because Mr. Gates’s empire at the moment dependslike all the other billionaireson sucking up to this guy. Gates released his document the same day that Hurricane Melissa hit Jamaica with the highest wind speeds we’ve ever recorded, the kind of wind speed you can only get when you’ve dramatically increased the heat content of the ocean by warming the atmosphere. We don’t have a final number yet. We won’t for a long time. There’s parts of it people still haven’t really reached yet, but the insurance industry was estimating that it wiped out between 30% and 250% of Jamaica’s annual GDP. So let’s transpose that to the United States. That would be as if Hurricane Katrina, which did a $100 billion worth damage here, had done $9 trillion worth of damage here. All in all, it’s just a way of saying that Gates is being silly here, especially because the most important tool that we have for rapid development in the developing worldthe quick rapid adoption of solar energyis also the thing that would be most useful for dealing with the climate. Despite all those upsetting facts you just shared, in the intro to the book, you say that after decades of pessimism, you now see at least some room for optimism in the climate conversation. Why is that? About five years ago, we crossed some invisible line where it became cheaper to produce energy from the sun and wind and batteries than from burning coal and gas and oil. I’ll note that that was the same year that Bill Gates published his last book explaining why there was a huge green premium because it was so expensive to [get energy from] sun and wind. He managed to miss what was happening. That’s a really epochal moment for human civilization. Human beings have been setting things on fire for 700,000 years. Darwin said that language and fire were the two things that set our species apart. Now we don’t need the fire anymore. Fossil fuel combustion kills nine million people a year directly on this planet. About one in five deaths come from just from breathing in particles that lodge in your lungs. There are five million schoolchildren in New Delhi. Two and a half million of them have irreversible lung damage from breathing the air. And as long as we depend on fossil fuel, we’re in the pocket of the people who control the small deposits of these resources around the world. The king of Saudi Arabiagreat guyVladimir Putin, who has taken his winnings and launched a land war in Europe in the 21st century, and the CEO of Exxon. The last 36 months have seen a huge surge in clean energy. We’re getting a third more power from the sun this autumn than we were last autumn on this planet. We’ve hit that steep part of the S curve and we’ve got to keep it going. When you were working on this book, did you also consider nuclear energy as an alternative to fossil fuel? Nuclear power, I’ve got no real problem with. Everybody knows what the dangers are, but those dangers are considerably smaller than the dangers of overheating the planet. Maybe someday someone will make nuclear power at a price that allows us to do it with some speed and at some scale, but so far we’re not there. And it’s hard because nuclear power has to compete with the very inexpensive power that you can get from the sun and the wind and the speed with which you can build those things. If you want to build yourself a data center and you need a power supply, [using] nuclear power is going to take you some years to build it. The Chinese were building three gigawatts of solar panels a day in May. A gigawatt is the rough equivalent of a coal-fired power plant. So they were putting up one of those every eight hours. This stuff snaps together, it’s not hard. If China is moving so quickly on solar, why is installing solar panels in the U.S. so expensive? In most of the world, if you want solar panels on your roof, you call somebody on Monday and they’re there by Friday. Here, it’s a monthslong odyssey. We’ve got 15,000 municipalities. Each has their own building code. All of this is unnecessary. The National Renewable Energy Lab gave us this nifty little tool calle the SolarAPP. A contractor can tap in the address where they’re putting up the solar panel and the equipment, and if the computer likes the match, it gives them an instant permit and they get to work on the roof. California, Maryland, and New Jersey have adopted this. When that kind of stuff really takes off, the results are amazing. In Australia, 40% of homes have solar panels on their roof. The government in Australia announced that beginning next year they will have so much solar power in the afternoon that electricity will be free for all Australians for three hours every afternoon. You said weve crossed this invisible line where solar became the cheapest form of energy on earth. How does this shift the economic argument for governments? In the rest of the world? Absolutely. This work’s being pioneered in China. They’re the ones who are doing two-thirds of the clean energy installation around the world, and as a result, they’re now owning things like the world’s auto industry. This is especially good for the 80% of human beings who live in countries that have to import fossil fuel. When poor countries go into payments crises or have to have the IMF come in and structurally adjust their economies, it’s almost always because at least in part, they’ve had to pay huge amounts of foreign reserves in order to get the next tanker load full of oil to keep their economy sputtering along. Now they can go spend their money on Chinese solar panels, and after that point they’re not dependent on China anymore. They’re now dependent on the sun. Generative AI takes an enormous amount of energy to power. How do you think about that in the context of this book? Let’s stipulate for the moment that we don’t really know at the moment how much of that AI hype is a bubble and how much is real. But if you decided that you absolutely had to build lots of data centers very fast in order to stay ahead of China in this race, the easiest way to build them fast would be to use solar and wind. This is precisely what’s not happening right now. At the moment, the Trump administration is all in on building data centers and all out on building cheap energy from the sun and the wind. The result is you’ve increased demand, constricted supply, and the price is going up. Americans are paying 10% more now for electricity than they did last year, and that’s just the beginning. You founded nonprofit Third Act to organize people over 60 to fight climate change. Why is this demographic key to changing the conversation around climate activism? If you look around for who has structural power, it’s really a lot of people with hairlines like mine. There are 70 million Americans over the age of 60. We punch above our weight politically because we all vote. We have lots of connections, lots of skills, and lots of time. And so it was an obvious thing to try. Many people said, “This will never work because people become more conservative as they age.” I think this is not so true for this generation of old people. These are the people who were around when we started taking women seriously in public life, they saw the apex of the Civil Rights Movement. They were there for the first Earth Day in 1970 when 20 million Americans10% of the populationmarched in the biggest demonstration in American history. These are people who know that change is possible. We have it in our muscle memory. We’ve got about a hundred thousand people around the country [that are part of Third Act], and great working groups in almost every state. They do incredible work of all kinds . . . lots of very mundane lobbying, letter writing. All of that is effective because politicians know that these people are going to be at the ballot box. As our democracy begins to flicker and falter, I think it’s particularly useful to have older people engaged in this work, because the one thing that young people can’t understand about Trump is how completely abnormal he is. If nothing else, Americans, especially of my age, owe an enormous climate debt to the rest of the planet. If you’re 70 now, you’ve been alive to watch more than 80% of all the carbon that humans have ever produced be put into the atmosphere. And that made your life conspicuously easier. Now it’s making everybody but especially poor people’s lives conspicuously harder. So we’ve got some work to do. Youve said there are two forces slowing the transition to renewables down. Those are inertia and vested interest. And I’m curious how should climate activism evolve to fight those two things? We’ve talked a little bit about vested interest already. We have to win some elections. It would be a lot easier if we didn’t have things like Citizens United that allow the rich to toy with our political system. Inertia is also a big force. We do things somewhat slowly, sometimes for good economic reasons. It’s cheaper to make transitions slowly. You have to figure out ways to overcome that inertia to make it easy and exciting to do the right thing.
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