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For once, the latest multibillion-dollar AI deal—this time Microsoft and Nvidia investing in Anthropic—isn’t the day’s biggest tech news development. (Skip down for details on that story.) More important was a Washington judge’s ruling on Tuesday that Meta Platforms isn’t a monopoly. So much for all those breathless headlines suggesting Meta might get broken up! The ruling was good news for CEO Mark Zuckerberg, even interrupting a big sell-off in Meta stock—for a few hours, as Meta shares ended slightly down for the day.
The ruling is also the first big loss for the federal government in its latest spate of antitrust cases against big tech, although its victory against Google hasn’t led to any meaningful penalties against that tech giant so far. (The Apple and Amazon cases are still to be tried.) But at least the Justice Department got to first base with the Google search and ad tech lawsuits, winning findings that Google had monopolies in both businesses. In the Meta case, the judge demolished the Federal Trade Commission’s arguments piece by piece. The case, originally brought in late 2020 by the first Trump administration and then carried on by the Biden administration, focused heavily on Meta’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp in 2012 and 2014, respectively. The FTC’s argument was that Meta—then called Facebook—had bought both companies to try to crush nascent competitors. That subject occupied a lot of time in the trial this past spring but proved largely irrelevant to Judge James Boasberg.
The judge took as a starting point that the FTC “must prove that Meta is violating the law now,” ruling that the agency’s argument that Meta had “broken the law in the past” was irrelevant. The law allows the FTC to try and block “conduct that currently violates the law or imminently will,” he said. With arguments about Meta’s past behavior off limits, he analyzed whether Meta currently had monopoly power, either directly or indirectly. The answer was no. Boasberg noted that Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube had “evolved to have nearly identical main features” and that TikTok and YouTube were “substitutes for Facebook and Instagram” for consumers. His conclusion was that the presence of YouTube and TikTok in the market “prevent Meta from holding a monopoly.” Even with YouTube excluded, “TikTok alone defeats the FTC’s case.”
The FTC, in Trumpian fashion, immediately attacked Boasberg, who has been a thorn in the Trump administration’s side on deportation cases. But the administration has only itself to blame for the decision, given that President Donald Trump was the one who decided to waive the ban-or-sell law on TikTok and keep the app alive. Judging from the wording of today’s decision, Boasberg would have had a harder time ruling in Meta’s favor if TikTok had been banned. The outcome is ironic, given that Trump said last year one reason to keep TikTok alive was to avoid helping Meta grow. Trump’s view that Meta would benefit from a TikTok ban was clearly on the money. But the president nonetheless appears to have misplayed this hand.
Waymo Widens Lead Over Tesla
Waymo is giving us even more evidence that it’s widening its lead over Tesla in autonomous ride hailing, despite Elon Musk’s insistence that his company will catch up.
The Alphabet-owned firm said Tuesday that its expansion into a bunch of new markets including Miami is underway. Waymo has removed the human safety driver from its cars in Miami and plans to do the same in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Orlando, Fla., in the coming weeks. It will start offering rides to the general public in all five cities in 2026. That’s on top of the five U.S. cities, including Phoenix and San Francisco, where Waymo already offers autonomous rides, as well as several other cities the company previously said are on the calendar for next year, such as Las Vegas and London.
Waymo’s focus on expanding in Florida and Texas feels like something of a jab at Musk, whose hyping of Tesla’s robotaxi service has far outpaced its actual expansion. Currently, Tesla offers rides in Austin, Texas, and in San Francisco, but it has backup human drivers inside its vehicles in both cities. Musk said in recent weeks that Tesla hopes to remove the people from its vehicles in Austin by the end of this year, and Tesla said at its shareholder meeting earlier this month that Miami, Houston, Dallas, Phoenix and Las Vegas are the next cities where it’s aiming to launch a robotaxi service (assuming it can satisfy regulators). With today’s announcement, Waymo is now operating or getting ready to operate in every single one of those cities, plus more.
If I were Musk, I would probably focus on removing backup operators from robotaxis in its existing markets before expanding elsewhere. That would help Tesla avoid embarrassing videos like this one filmed by a robotaxi passenger that topped the San Francisco Reddit forum on Tuesday, showing a Robotaxi operator literally asleep at the wheel. The joke writes itself.—Theo Wayt
Anthropic-Microsoft-Nvidia
Is there any precedent for the situation Anthropic is now in? Microsoft and Nvidia announced on Tuesday they would invest $5 billion and $10 billion, respectively, in the AI firm. Microsoft is already a big shareholder in Anthropic rival OpenAI, and Nvidia has committed to investing in the startup. At the same time, Microsoft’s biggest rivals in cloud, Amazon and Google, are also big shareholders in Anthropic. Just imagine what an Anthropic shareholder meeting will look like. Check out today’s TITV for more analysis.
In Other News
• John Hegeman is stepping down as Meta’s chief revenue officer. Andrew Bocking—the vice president of monetization product, who currently reports to Hegeman—will replace him, a spokesperson told the Information. Clara Shih, who joined Meta last November from Salesforce and reported to Hegeman, is also leaving.
• Websites around the world, including The Information’s, went down early on Tuesday due to an hourslong outage at Cloudflare, a web infrastructure firm (more here).
• Google unveiled its latest large language model, Gemini 3, which offers improved performance on various benchmarks (more here).
• Kraken, a crypto exchange that’s aiming to go public next year, said Tuesday it raised a $200 million strategic investment from Ken Griffin’s Citadel Securities at a $20 billion valuation.
Today on The Information’s TITV
Check out our latest episode of TITV in which Akash Pasricha talks with Jessica Lessin about the status of Jeff Bezos’ new AI venture.
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