Lots of important monopoly-related things happened last week. Now that Apple’s app store monopoly is broken, developers are cutting prices and building cool stuff. The tariff shock is about to hit in force, but the stock market has recovered all of its losses since April 2nd. Plus a lot more.
But before getting to the full round-up, I want to focus on the social future that Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is building for all of us, whether we like it or not, and how reliant it is on the firm’s market power.
Take a recent viral clip about a future of AI friends, therapists, and girlfriends, from an interview he did on the Dwarkesh podcast. Zuckerberg talked how Americans on average have only three friends, but want fifteen. He then explained that though emotional connections with AI bots are socially disfavored now, eventually society will “find the vocabulary” to understand that people who use AI to fill a hole of loneliness in their lives are “rational.”
Zuckerberg has continued with this theme. In a little noticed but important interview that Zuckerberg gave to business writer Ben Thompson a few days ago, he expanded on his view of how AI-friendship can work. While a lot of people took Zuckerberg to mean that you’ll have AI friends instead of real friends, and that is sort of what he was saying, he also was making it clear that Meta has an AI strategy based on knowing a lot about your friends and family.
Here’s what he told Thompson:
I think one of the things that I’m really focused on is how can you make it so AI can help you be a better friend to your friends, and there’s a lot of stuff about the people who I care about that I don’t remember, I could be more thoughtful. There are all these issues where it’s like, “I don’t make plans until the last minute”, and then it’s like, “I don’t know who’s around and I don’t want to bug people”, or whatever. An AI that has good context about what’s going on with the people you care about, is going to be able to help you out with this.
And this statement brings me to the key question in the Meta antitrust case, which is whether the firm is truly a monopolist. Meta isn’t like Google, which is the only real search engine. You can look at stuff on Facebook or Instagram, or you can do so on TikTok, for instance. So how can the government argue there’s a monopoly at work? The claim is there’s a special market – social interactions with friends and family – that Meta dominates. While you can watch short-form video on TikTok, you can’t connect with friends the way you can on Meta’s apps. You mostly do that on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, ergo it’s a monopoly.
This dynamic is very common in antitrust cases, where the market at issue is contested. To draw an analogy, you can get food at a gas station and a supermarket, and so they do compete when you’re running out for a stick of gum. But buying groceries is also its own market. Whether all food is the market, or whether there are special sub-markets, is the heart of the Meta case.
To avoid being categorized as a monopolist, Zuckerberg on the stand kept saying that Meta doesn’t really do the friends and family thing anymore, that mostly what they care about is competing with TikTok for time spent watching viral videos. But in this interview with Thompson, Zuckerberg has made it crystal clear that connecting with friends is not only a core part of Meta’s value proposition, it’s a key piece of their future strategy with generative AI.
Ok, so that’s the legal element. But beyond the law, let’s talk about why people find Zuckerberg so disturbing. In that same interview, he talked about how AI can be a useful therapist substitute.
I personally have the belief that everyone should probably have a therapist, it’s like someone they can just talk to throughout the day, or not necessarily throughout the day, but about whatever issues they’re worried about and for people who don’t have a person who’s a therapist, I think everyone will have an AI.
This kind of social commentary is common for Zuckerberg, and it’s one reason that the company is routinely ranked among the country’s “Worst Companies,” according to Meta’s own internal surveys.
The clip of him discussing the need for AI friends went viral for two reasons. First, addressing our loneliness epidemic with a technology that mimics friendship feels creepy and wrong. But lots of people make bizarre suppositions. Why did this clip go viral? Well that’s the second reason. There’s discomfort with the idea that one man has the amount of power to actually enact such a vision. And if anyone can do that, it’s Zuckerberg.
To understand why, you have to look at the other part of his vision, which he also laid out in the interview with Thompson. In it, he discussed how Meta’s use of AI will transform not just advertising, but business itself. Here’s what he said:
[We want to] use AI to make it so that any business that basically wants to achieve some business outcome can just come to us, not have to produce any content, not have to know anything about their customers. Can just say, “Here’s the business outcome that I want, here’s what I’m willing to pay, I’m going to connect you to my bank account, I will pay you for as many business outcomes as you can achieve”… I think it is a redefinition of the category of advertising. So if you think about what percent of GDP is advertising today, I would expect that that percent will grow.
That’s a remarkable statement. Businesses won’t have to “produce any content” and will not have to “know anything about their customers.” Meta, or rather, Meta’s AI agent, will simply take over the connection between businesses and customers, as well as most branding choices. It has more data, more scale, more connections, and has the best black box in the world. The future is one in which marketing for all firms means handing over commerce to an automated infrastructure controlled by one man.
It’s this expansive business strategy that makes the social vision possible. He can print money, build whatever he seeks, and push it into the feeds of billions of people who have nowhere else to go. Taming this man’s power is increasingly urgent, because of the power he wields and the power he increasingly seeks to wield. Zuckerberg has always been interested in using power to engage in widespread social engineering. In 2010, he made this comment about the nature of humanity in modern society.
“The days of you have a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly. Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity… To get people to this point where there’s more openness – that’s a big challenge. But I think we’ll do it.”
Zuckerberg didn’t achieve that goal, but he has managed to foster a lot of harm over the years with these guesses about how humanity should seek to be. For instance, in 2007, he launched Beacon, which automatically put your off Facebook purchases in your feed, which exposed, among other things, the HIV status of users, as well as purchases of engagement rings. I won’t go through the litany of scandals, suffice to say that just last week, the Wall Street Journal did a report on how Meta’s chatbots are talking about fantasy sex with children. “Pushed by Zuckerberg, Meta made multiple internal decisions to loosen the guardrails around the bots to make them as engaging as possible,” wrote Jeff Horwitz. Meta’s AI is now being pushed across all its platforms, used by billions of people.
And that brings me back to Zuckerberg’s comment about AI therapists. Therapists and psychiatrists are moral creatures, they have ethical guidelines and training, and legally speaking, they are fiduciaries. They don’t tell their patients to kill themselves, to harm other people, and they don’t spy on them to help sell stuff. But that’s what AI chatbots can do, and that’s why it’s so important for Judge James Boasberg not to allow this man to be in charge of the future of communications.
No one should have this much power. And while I don’t think the personality of a monopolist is that important, I did find this other comment quite chilling. “If you think that something someone is doing is bad and they think it’s really valuable,” he told Dwarkesh Patel, “most of the time in my experience they’re right and you’re wrong.”
That’s the logic of a drug dealer.
And now, the rest of the news round-up. It’s been 30 days since Trump announced his tariff plan on ‘liberation day,’ and that’s about how long it takes ships to arrive from China. Will the tariff shock start slamming into the U.S. economy? Also, while there’s jubilation in the little tech world as Apple loses its control over the app economy, there’s a fly in the ointment. Plus, the Antitrust Division investigates Safelite, and Trump is trying to “save Hollywood” by ordering a tariff on movies made abroad. And a whole lot more, after the paywall.