Good morning.
It's Monday, April 14th.
I'm Shemita Basu.
This is Apple News Today.
On today's show, why the Social Security Administration is declaring some people dead, falsely and on purpose.
Higher ed institutions are doing disaster budgeting,
and those tariff exemptions for smartphones and other electronics will be short-lived.
But first, social media giant Metta, formerly known as Facebook,
is in court starting today in a massive antitrust trial that could change the entire social media landscape.
The Federal Trade Commission alleges the company violated antitrust laws
when it acquired Instagram in 2012 and the messaging service WhatsApp in 2014.
Lauren Finer is a senior policy writer for The Verge,
and she told us the government is arguing Metta with those acquisitions essentially became a monopoly.
Metta ended up growing its dominance and cutting off what could have been really formidable competitors to its dominance and
that it did that in order to retain this power in the market so that no one else could really come up against it.
The FTC cites a 2012 email in its argument where Metta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg names startups like Instagram
as potentially disruptive to its business.
Metta says the company always competes fairly
and is facing punishment for its success in growing those apps into major players in the social media world.
Finer says the crux of the FTC's argument is that Metta monopolizes personal social networking services,