The FTC is suing Meta, and it has a right to get other companies to admit that they are in fact competitors to Meta in the VR Space. SimulaVR is being pretty bad faith in claiming that:
"Meta sells reasonably good gaming headsets to customers who want to be entertained in VR; we're selling general-purpose productivity devices which are aimed at replacing PCs"
Meta pretty clearly intends to compete not just in the gaming VR space but to have general purpose and professional use VR Headsets. Likely all that will come from this is a few internal graphs which include Meta as a competitor in the space.
> Meta pretty clearly intends to compete not just in the gaming VR space but to have general purpose and professional use VR Headsets. Likely all that will come from this is a few internal graphs which include Meta as a competitor in the space.
Part of the antitrust action is determining the boundaries of the market.
If company A has a monopoly in market X, and company B competes in related market Y, ... the fact that company A intends to enter market Y does not mean company B is preventing company A from having a monopoly in market X. (But if X and Y are the same market, they are!)
> In fairness to Meta: the FTC is the one who initiated this fight, leaving them with the burden of demonstrating it isn't behaving "anti-competitively".
But I agree, the post does seem similar to an individual trying to get attention for their cause, ie. 'Google locked me out...'. To me the tone is probably trying to help sell their narrative of them being this small thing not worth subpoenaing.
This is clearly wildly emotional and (hopefully) hyperbolic.
It makes no sense at all that any company can use another to defend itself like that.
As far as I can see Meta should hire researchers to assemble data about the state of the market from public data.
Or even further, really whoever is charging Meta should have to bear that burden of collecting that data to prove it.
If corporations are people then they are innocent until proven guilty. If corporations are not people then GREAT! We have a lot of old cases I would love to see unwound that hinged on that ridiculous idea. But they can't be both at different times, and still claim to have a system that has any integrity and that we should respect.
It does seem like if there are collateral subpoenas from FTC action, the feds should foot the bill.
> In fairness to Meta: the FTC is the one who initiated this fight, leaving them with the burden of demonstrating it isn't behaving "anti-competitively". So naturally, one of the primary (only?) things Meta can do to demonstrate this is to subpoena...well...its competition...to demand documents which might help them in court
To the extent that you have a problem with the subpoena, blame the judge who authorized it, or perhaps the legal system that makes such subpoenas possible. Meta is not the aggressor here.
> naturally, one of the primary (only?) things Meta can do to demonstrate this is to subpoena...well...its competition...to demand documents which might help them in court
Well then Meta's attorneys should contact SimulaVR directly instead of sending them a legal letter.
Look, I get that you guys are a small shop but you should not be surprised to be asked to provide evidence in an antitrust litigation over the VR market. I'm guessing you haven't seen a subpoena before - they are all like this, and your attorneys will be able to negotiate something much less burdensome.
So get off Hacker News and let your lawyers handle it.
We're letting our legal counsel handle the actual details, the rest is just talking about it.
If everyone kept their mouths shut as you suggest, we wouldn't know about how rotten the legal system is until it was our turn at the gallows.
They didn't make a site to complain; it's their blog by which they're informing buyers and potential buyers of anything that can affect their progress. It also doesn't matter who shared on HN. Any HN user with an interest in them would have shared something this significant, like I was about to.
>SimulaVR should be working with Meta's attorneys on this instead of throwing a hissy fit online.
Question:
Is meta's lawyers bound in any way to treat simulaVR the same way you treated your subpoenaees?
I don't even care if they do, or would, the question is, are they legally bound to do so? If not, that's a systemic issue.
I suspect the answer is no they aren't, and the burden is on the subpoenaees to convince the court to limit the burdensomeness of the subpoena, which is itself a burden that is unacceptable.
This isn't as strong a justification as one might imagine. That system sucks in many ways. Recently we learned that DoJ routinely take every document held by particular targeted law firms, without warrants, and then designate "taint teams" of DoJ lawyers who view every document and suggest which ones should be seen by investigators. [0] The idea is that the taint team will forget all the documents they've seen when they later investigate other clients of the targeted law firms. Many judges have ordered this practice stopped, but DoJ DGAF.
This taint team concept obviously is unconstitutional and undermines justice, but ISTM the practice you describe is worse. When Meta's lawyers view documentation extracted from SimulaVR, they do so as agents of Meta. Their current stated goal may be to defend Meta in the present suit, but there's no reason to believe that's the only goal they'll ever have. Have Meta promised to throw away all documents after some of them have been presented to the court? Is there some sort of escrow concept that allows SimulaVR to trust someone other than Meta's lawyers? The danger to SimulaVR is actually greater if Meta are telling the truth that they are competitors!
If Meta actually were competitors of SimulaVR, it would be easy to show that by hiring an expert to testify that "this service and/or product sold by SimulaVR competes with this other service and/or product sold by Meta". The sort of thing described in TFA has other purposes.
[0] https://taibbi.substack.com/p/the-justice-department-was-dan...
Doesn't this depend on whether Meta is actually guilty of what the FTC is accusing them of? If they are, then clearly the wrong thing they did was behave anti-competitively.
If they are guilty of that, then it is fair to blame them for being dragged into their defense. While everyone has the right to defend themselves, it is fair to be upset at having to be called in the defense of someone who broke the law.
Until a Court process says otherwise, Meta have done nothing wrong here.
I made this mistake and ordered an Oculus earlier this year. While I waited for it to arrive, I setup a facebook/meta account since that is a requirement. Before the headset arrived, Meta had flagged my account as fake, and the process to prove that I was in fact a real person would not accept my cell phone number. There was nothing else I could do to prove I was real. So, fake me returned the headset when it arrived, and then fake me felt a sense of relief in the giant bullet I had just dodged.
Hire a lawyer for a few hours to confirm what I say since I’m some random internet guy.
We've also been commanded to drop everything we're doing and go tesify on these matters _in person_, thousands of miles away from us, by the stated deadline :|
So it's not just a matter of writing "we don't know". They have to produce a lot of material and then travel 1000's of miles to show up in the court in person.
It’s not just the few hours they’ll be testifying, or giving deposition. A reasonable corporate representative is going to need to do quite a bit of prep work and review of relevant materials. So, that’s both a legal cost, and a productivity cost for whoever is collecting those documents and briefing the corporate representative.
“Just some hired legal representatives” hides quite a bit of cost.
The suggestion was "hire a legal representative" to be the corporate witness. I would assume that's a suggestion similar to the one in this article (https://www.agilelaw.com/blog/hiring-a-lawyer-to-be-your-30b...) about hiring a lawyer to be your 30(b)(6) deponent.
So, let's assume we hire a lawyer at $300/hour. Let's say they'll be a witness for 6 hours. But, they need to be carefully briefed and prepped on all the topics that they would need to be a witness for. Maybe that's 40 hours of work.
46*$300 = $13,800.
As the article on 30(b)(6) depositions notes: "So to do it right, the lawyer will need to be thoroughly prepped on the 30(b)(6) notice topics, which will certainly take time and cost the client money. No one said litigation is cheap."
I think most small-businesses would probably choose to use an internal employee to be their corporate representatives, especially in a matter such as this where they aren't directly involved in the litigation.
And complaining about how the subpoena's asking for tons of documents. Again, every subpoena does this; you have to negotiate with the attorneys on the other side to figure out what they actually want. If SimulaVR was suing Meta, then yeah, Meta will play hardball. But they're a third-party here - chances are, attorneys for Meta are looking for very specific things (namely, economics to support Meta's arguments about the VR market) and SimulaVR will be able to negotiate a way to provide that info without turning their company inside and out.
And if you are asking WHY SimulaVR should be required to provide ANY info at all... well, that's the American legal system. Courts and parties have broad power to obtain evidence from third parties.
Basically, SimulaVR needs to grow up and hire lawyers to handle this.
Why is this so hard to grasp. This subpoena is to get certain market information. SimulaVR can negotiate with Meta to provide the information in a way that's not super burdensome for them. I did this all the time when I was a lawyer.
SimulaVR is a FRIENDLY WITNESS for Meta, since they can presumably provide evidence that Meta operates in a competitive VR market. This means Meta's lawyers will be very accommodating to get the info they need.
And yeah guess what, you need to hire lawyers from time to time when you run a business. Just like you need to hire accountants. It sucks but that's how things are.
All the accounting you need to do at the beginning of your business can be done by yourself, or very cheaply. Fighting Meta's claim to your business secrets is not going to be cheap.
Do you have any advice on how to find a competent attorney with reasonable fees who can do the specific work that you need done? The one time I had to do this for my business on short notice, I used Yelp and Google, and it was somewhat disastrous. I think it would be really helpful for me, and a lot of other folks, to know the right way to do this.
Ignore the tone of these things. Legal is commanded to write in this manner.
They received a letter that looks important and official to them, and looks to them like something they have to comply with.
Are you giving legal advice to ignore letters from lawyers?
The only advice I saw them give was to hire lawyers to help them deal with it.
My question is a logical extension of that.
It wasn't SimulaVR who responded to you, so why respond by insulting SimulaVR for the comment of someone else? They've already got legal counsel:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33111249
All SimulaVR did in their blog post is state the facts. They haven't refuted the point you said, and may be already looking into that.
It still find it odd that people think large corporations actively engage in ethics in any other capacity than for PR and manipulating public opinion. I have never in my life seen anything other than the smallest of private companies make a decision based on "ethical" reasons where there was a competing financial reason. Can you recall, over your entire career, where a product decision was made for ethical (rather than purely PR or legal) reasons? I have witness several companies where bringing up ethical concerns about company behavior ultimately leads to termination.
The most obvious example of this non-ethical nature of corporations is record companies bringing up the "unethical" behavior of piracy. It's not like the heads of these companies had a big ethics meeting and decided "hey piracy is not ethical, we need to fight it!" or otherwise they would have also been like "and... next on the agenda is the unethical profiting of black musicians in the 50s and 60s, we should start cutting some checks now since that was clearly wrong."
Ethics is a social construction, created by participants in a society, as a way of organizing and regulating behavior. Ethics is subtle, flexible and perpetually evolving. We as a collective can develop and evolve our ethics overtime, but the essential part is that everyone is playing the same game.
Corporations are not playing the game at all, "ethics" from the view of a corporate entity is just another tool they can use to manipulate public opinion, but they don't participate in the ethics game.
The problem is that they participating in society in an asymmetric way. They want everyone else to adhere to an ethical system when interacting with them, but consider themself completely outside the realm of ethics.
When normal humans decide that they do not want to participate in the ethics game there are consequences ranging from mild chastisement to complete estrangement from society depending on the degree one individual refuses to participate in the ethical system of the larger society.
This is not to say corporations are evil, but that are absolutely amoral in that they are not participating the moral and ethical game. Bears are amoral in the same way. We don't expect bears to make ethical decisions, but when they habitually violate the ethical code of the humans they interact with, they are usually put down as a threat to society.
Yes, because I made them.
As a nation built on capitalism, it is those who are able to influence the decisions of corporations that bear the burden and responsibility of the decisions made by those corporations. Whether those individuals are held accountable or not is irrelevant to the fact that ethics certainly ought to be considered for any individual involved who believes themselves to be "acting ethically".
I've worked hard in my career to get a seat at the table where those decisions are made because I recognize that is a place where good can be done, at scale.
We should hold ourselves, and capitalism, to higher standards. And for those of us who are leaders, whether that is a small start-up or a major conglomerate, we are responsible for creating an environment where ethical decisions can be made.
This is an interesting idea, and I agree that it would be great if it were true, but it’s not, and I don’t think it’s ever been. Those who make decisions for corporations don’t bear any burden; everyone else does.
> Whether those individuals are held accountable or not is irrelevant
This is actually a perfect example of the point I was making. "I want the benefits of participating in an ethical system but don't want the consequences".
This is why people claim that corporations behave like sociopaths.
A bear (from my example), isn't a sociopath, because it doesn't expect moral behavior from you, nor does it expect to benefit from moral behavior applied to it. A bear is perfectly amoral. A bear may cause you harm, and you may harm a bear, you might feel bad you had to kill a bear, but the bear will not be concerned either way with your ethical system, it simply wants to eat and live.
A sociopath on the other hand takes advantage of moral asymmetry, expecting you to treat it like a person when you interact with it (for example showing mercy for its trespasses), but wanting to be free to act like a bear in regards to serving its own ends.
I giggled. When you go from "don't be evil" to this, you know you fucked up big time. This has to be the tagline of the decade in regards to Google ("Google!, the boss of Satan", hi hi hi).
Google still provides android, Google maps, Gmail for free. World changing at it's time still helping people around the globe.
Their research blog is fantastic and shows what they value.
Google Io focus on people and security and trust.
Google is much further away from evil than plenty of other companies.
Did they kill stadia? Yes.
Did actually anyone care? No. Because stadia didn't matter anyway.
Have you checked the last Google Io?
They don't hide that they collect data.
Android is still open.
You can't expect Google to just give you a android distribution without their stuff for free just because.
You still can use it.
They have a mode in Chrome called "incognito mode" that, to the average person, strongly implies it doesn't collect data, yet of course it does.
It says what it does right there when you open it, and collecting data _and sending it to google_ would be pretty damn weird in incognito mode.
You're not invisible to websites, ISPs, ... and it says so right on the page.
They’re probably largely to blame for setting the precedent that Internet services should be free. And of course backed by selling user data or unsustainable venture capital backed business models.
That's just the fat, juicy worm dangling on the hook just waiting for you to take it all in--hook, line, and sinker.
I can decide if I'm okay with it or not. You are clearly not. I'm.
Not to belabor a frequently raised discussion topic, but "free" as in gratis is not the same as "zero dollars"
And google charges its customers
Don’t make us all laugh. It’s ‘free’ because the user is the product, not the service.
We all know what it means. Still doesn't change the fact what the value for billion of people is real.
I paid for the phone and they are still collecting my data. For me this is not free.
You paid for the phone, not for the google services.
You're free to use non-google services on android. Moreover open street map, and numerous other email clients, exist - it's even a practical choice.
> For me this is not free.
No comment on this portion
That was your decision. There are other options.
And while you mind, billions are really happy to have a very secure and relativity cheap phone.
I don't think Google is evil because they get money through ads.
I'm fine with that.
There is also a huge difference on how Google collects, stores and analysis your data vs. companies like Facebook.
I'm pretty sure Google actually knows we're your data is in comparison to Facebook
Apple is playing the game without ads as well.
Nokia could have forked android.
Google just continue to care enough.
The other companies could replicate it. The just don't mind
It's a ruthless, profit-drive, shareholder-owned, S&P 500-dominating company like all the rest, so you get all of that into the mix. It's not a particularly flattering group to be in if you're big into modern northern european social-good democracy.
But the idea that Meta is like, worse than the sovereign wealth fund in Riyadh that YC routinely connects founders with, or worse than Exxon, or worse than the pharma cartels, or? I could go on.
That's just silly now, come on.
And... it sort of has to work this way? It's not the job of the court to do Meta or FTC's advocacy for them.
https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/64436614/federal-trade-...
Rather a lawyer that is admitted to the case uses his power as a representative to serve a subpoena. These are usually NOT reviewed by the judge or court first. The person receiving a subpoena can ask the court to quash the subpoena (basically void or modify the subpoena) if they believe the subpoena is inappropriate, unduly burdensome, or whatever else.
Yes. Obviously they need a lawyer. But they should be able to get this quashed. At least narrowed and moved somewhere more convenient.