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Comment by Raed667 | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain why is meta entitled to see a 3rd party's business plans, financials and statistics?

Though I'm not a lawyer, I believe defendants in court cases are entitled to command witnesses (signed off by a judge) to provide evidence that could be used in their defense.

It makes sense in the abstract: e.g. imagine you're accused of murder, and you know someone saw you somewhere else at the supposed time of the crime, yet they refuse to provide evidence to help you. It would seem reasonable they could compel you under that circumstance to testify.

Since the FTC has initiated a court case against Meta, I assume they are provided a similar legal right to command competitors to provide evidence that they haven't behaved "anti-competitively".

The question becomes whether, in this particular instance, they're abusing that privilege by demanding information they shouldn't be entitled to from unrelated/extraneous parties.

Heh, demand that the court provide you immunity from prosecution for being a monopoly, or refuse to testify on the fifth (because you obviously are a monopoly planning on buying Meta).

As you can see, also not a lawyer.

It's explained in the post. The FTC accused them of being anti-competitive. The only way to show you're not anti-competitive is to demand documents of your opponents that demonstrate you still have competition.

Then why not share to the FTC themselves and not META so that you can still keep it confidential from your competition?

In general it's a good idea to let the defendant decide how to argue their case and have access to evidence, for better and worse.

Because FTC isn't the defendant. How would anyone share counter evidence to the plaintiff?

then how about a neutral third party?

Seems like a "I'll know when I see it" situation. In that, if the FTC thinks they are anti-competitive, they probably are and at least should be blocked from acquiring their competition.

Breaking them up or taking actual action against them would require deeper investigation with FTC taking the lead rather than potentially handing sensitive documents over to the offending company.

If the company wants to fight the block of acquisitions would foot the bill for everyone being supeonaed along with the FTC's expenses regardless of the case's success.

> In that, if the FTC thinks they are anti-competitive, they probably are

Wait? What?

It seems like a pretty strange position to just assume that the government is always right. I mean, if I said, all people the police arrest are probably guilty and should go to jail, I would hope you'd disagree.

> It seems like a pretty strange position to just assume that the government is always right.

Big cases against big companies are different. Since the company will have (nearly) unlimited resources to fight, the FTC will only bring a case if they're pretty sure they can win, otherwise it will be a big waste of money all around.

It's really not anything like the police arresting people.

The government has lost many antitrust cases. In fact, they often do them for political reasons, not because they actually care about the outcome.

By the same logic: if FTC thinks net neutrality is bad, it probably is...

IANAL, so take this with some salt, but I don’t think Meta is directly requesting the documents, and Meta is probably never going to see them. I don’t think they get to request everything and pick through it to find a defense.

Subpoenas come from the court (which is how they’re able to be legally binding, i.e. you can be held liable—-in contempt—-for not complying), so my guess is that the court will review the various documents for evidence that Simula is or isn’t a competitor, so as to decide both whether they fit the bill as a competitor, and whether they’ll be needed during a trial. I imagine that the court can even decide that Simula does not provide evidence in either direction, so they’ll uninvolve Simula.

Meta requested it, meta wrote the subpoena, and meta is the party who will receive the supplied documents.

You are confusing signed off by the court with issued by the court.

Documents have to be given to both sides or it's a pretty easy mistrial. It is likely nobody but Meta's lawyers will ever look at any of it, but they will look to try to build a defense.

And if something interesting WAS found, it would get out. And some of these things would become public record, either way.

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