Technology

A significant antitrust trial against Meta commenced Monday in Washington, where the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) alleges the social media giant engaged in anticompetitive practices by acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp. The FTC contends that Meta, which owned Facebook, purchased Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014 specifically to eliminate competition and establish a monopoly. Although the FTC initially reviewed and approved these acquisitions with a commitment to monitor outcomes, a victory in this case could force Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to divest both platforms. Meta has expressed confidence in winning the case. Experts suggest the company will likely argue that Instagram users have benefited from Meta's ownership. "The FTC's argument is that the acquisition of Instagram was a way of neutralizing this rising competitive threat to Facebook," explains Rebecca Haw Allensworth, a professor of antitrust at Vanderbilt Law School. Allensworth […]

Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) has opened an investigation into how Elon Musk's X platform processes user data to train its Grok AI model. The inquiry will examine whether X complied with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) when processing personal data from publicly-accessible posts made by European Union users. Specifically, the investigation will assess the lawfulness and transparency of how this data was used to train Grok's Large Language Models (LLMs). Grok refers to a suite of AI models developed by xAI that powers a generative AI chatbot available on the X platform. "Like other modern LLMs, the Grok LLMs have been developed and trained on a wide variety of data," the DPC explained in its statement. The Irish regulator clarified that the investigation will focus specifically on "personal data in publicly accessible posts posted on the 'X' social […]