This is not Meta demanding to see some privilege information that exists in Simula's drawers, but rather commandeering the entire competing organization to do market research for Meta. It is clever and evil, and nothing anybody says after this will make me think that Meta is not anti-competitive nor that they have an once of ethics. As a consumer, I doubt I will ever again consider their VR products; I rather give my money to Satan, or even Google.
This seems like a wildly emotional response that is completely out of line with what is being asked.
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.
> SimulaVR is being pretty bad faith in claiming that:...
> 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!)
At the same time, you can imagine that SimulaVR wants to assert "we are not proof META isn't a monopoly". Further, they probably don't want to provide key market information that could aid an aggressive monopolist from leveraging their way into SimulaVR's space.
Simula may not want to hurt meta (a competitor) when that competitor is burning billions in cash to prop up a VR market. They may benefit from a growing consumer awareness and UX research.
Not sure if "wildly emotional" is fair to them either.
> 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. Further, if any other company or person can be compelled to give up their private data against their will, and perform actions and expend resources and rob from their actual jobs they need to be doing, then it for damned sure shouldn't be in service to anyone who they have no relationship with. The court should be the only ones able to do that, and the government should have to pay for it (meaning you and I of course, which means they should only do it if there is some reason that benefits us all) and any private data strictly controlled and only handled managed by the court or some agreed 3rd party.
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.
Eyeroll. Meta did nothing wrong here. This isn't them going after their competition; they're the defendant in this lawsuit. As the article says:
> 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.
Facebook is very much the aggressor -- in response to the FTC suit, their immediate response was to try and use the courts to strong-arm hundreds of competitors into giving up massive troves of highly sensitive commercial secrets without any kind of formal protection, such as limiting document review to FB's outside counsel. It's ridiculous, it's abusive, it's overbroad, and it's transparently an effort to burden Facebook's competitors while snowing the FTC with massive amounts of paper.
> 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
That's not how litigation works. If SimulaVR wants protection, it has to ask for it. SimulaVR has the right to ask 1) Meta and 2) the court to limit the scope of the subpoena and to set conditions on the review and distribution of the production. If Meta agrees to the conditions, great, the agreement can either be informal, or incorporated into an order for the judge to sign. If Meta is opposed, SimulaVR gets to make their case to the judge and let him decide scope and protective order details.
Welcome to the American legal system. Facebook did nothing wrong here. When I was an attorney and involved with these kinds of subpoenas, we always worked with the third-parties to make document production less burdensome for them. SimulaVR should be working with Meta's attorneys on this instead of throwing a hissy fit online.
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.
You made a site complaining about the subpoena and came to Hacker News to complain about it some more.
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 made our weekly blog post about it (because it's worth talking about, IMO) and someone else posted it on HN. It blew up and we're responding to comments as necessary.
We're letting our legal counsel handle the actual details, the rest is just talking about it.
> You made a site complaining about the subpoena and came to Hacker News to complain about it some more.
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.
>When I was an attorney and involved with these kinds of subpoenas, we always worked with the third-parties to make document production less burdensome for them.
>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.
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.
I'm not defending Meta, but what constitutes anti-competitive behaviour is often hard to define and requires a court process to ultimately decide - it's not a binary state one can easily recognize having entered or exited. If it was, many kinds of legal issue wouldn't need nearly as much court time.
Until a Court process says otherwise, Meta have done nothing wrong here.
Personally, I don't think there's any possible doubt that Meta/Facebook has behaved anti-competitively in a variety of ways over the years; the fact that they haven't been taken to task for this is largely because of the Chicago doctrine's absurd principle that such things only matter if they increase prices for consumers.
Obviously if the court rules they acted anti-competitively then yeah that would count as "doing something wrong", but I don't think it makes sense to call their legal defense itself evil. As you said, Meta has a right to defend itself in court, just like anyone.
> I doubt I will ever again consider their VR products
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.
This is a subpoena from a legal team, NOT a court. You are free to write “we don’t know” for much of the questions or even write “too burdensome to answer”. Such subpoenas have little teeth.
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.
This shows that SimulaVR is run by a bunch of children. Every subpoena says this, but you work with the attorneys to figure out the time and manner that works best for the deposition. I routinely flew thousands of miles to do depositions in places that worked best for the deposed.
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.
I'm not typically one to point at the HN guidelines, but you could have made your points and been informative without the insults. It's not helping anything and leading to otherwise unnecessary defensive back-and-forths.
So what if they don't have the funds? What if they have only so much for this but then have to close the business down because of it? It's a small startup.
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.
Judging by the responses in this thread, it seems like many folks on HN have never worked with an attorney before (which isn't too surprising).
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.
Unfortunately I think word of mouth is the best way to find good attorneys. Ask people who run similar businesses as you who they use? If there's a chamber of commerce in your city or town, you could ask them for references.
I'll chime in to say that I was very happy with @grellas's firm in Silicon Valley. I found them the right mix of startup-friendly and competent in tech issues. (grellas.com).
Haha friendly witness. Please hand over your current and future business plans over. What could possibly go wrong. Does nobody here see how that could backfire with Meta having such insight on your business?
Lol, you mean trusting Meta's people? That's insane.
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.
I was once subpoenaed by the state of New York. It was worded similarly, asking for a bunch of information and my personal appearance. I have never lived or worked in New York, and at the time was just a broke college student, so taking time off school to fly there would be more than an inconvenience. The information they sought was related to a fraud case, and their fraudster had bought something from one of my websites in the past. After I actually talked to the investigators over email, they never actually expected me to travel to New York, they were just looking for dates and IP addresses relating to these sales, which I emailed and my participation in their investigation was over. They didn't actually want me to go to New York, that was just boilerplate.
When I read the pompous first sentence of a US subpoena “COMMANDING” the recipient to do something, I like to think of it as a direct order from Vigo the Carpathian[0]
You’re missing the point. The source of the subpoena is important. Subpoenas from lawyers are not something you have to answer completely. They have no teeth. They are not from a court of law.
These specific people are being compelled to do that or the company is being compelled to show up in person? Those are wildly different demands. I find it hard to believe that specific productive employees of the company are being compelled to show up in court rather just some hired legal representatives of the company.
Right, but hiring a legal representative is going to be very expensive for a small organization.
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.
Honest question: Why not do what most of the ass-clowns do when they get in front of congress - "I don't know, Senator. I have no recollection, Congresswoman. I plead the 5th, You Honor. No, we don't spy on Americans." etc.? Seems like no one ever actually faces any penalties for this.
you can call an attorney and pay an hourly fee usually between 100 - 400/hr to talk with an attorney about your case or pay a retainer fee for 10 hours... attorneys that throw out 5 digit numbers when asked for a price are rip offs
Right, but the suggestion wasn't "have a short consult with a lawyer". That's not cheap, but definitely won't break the bank for most small businesses.
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.
Often I've gotten the initial consultation/advice for free on how to do it yourself. The point of lawyer is protecting you when you are in danger, and in my experience they're happy to tell you that you don't need a lawyer here, and give some general tips on the process.
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.
> Can you recall, over your entire career, where a product decision was made for ethical (rather than purely PR or legal) reasons?
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.
>it is those who are able to influence the decisions of corporations that bear the burden and responsibility
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'm not against having Simula foot the bill in preparing whatever materials they may need to prepare to aid in the FCC's investigation - I think that's a reasonable cost of doing business, one that ought to scale with the size of the company, no? However, I agree that there may be valuable information you'd rather your competitor not have access to at your expense. Is there instances of, or analogues in other domains, of information relevant to the persecution of one party, belonging to another party, being reviewed in confidence by a third party? Or failing to find a fair solution in terms of that approach, how much can that information be trimmed?
> I rather give my money to Satan, or even Google<
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).
How can you determine it is cheap when Google is anticompetitively subsidizing the cost with advertising and data collection? You could be getting hosed and never know it.
Because android itself is free but I'm not seeing a lot of companies or you taking the time and effort to make an ad free Android phone for the same price or cheaper.
A competitor can’t enter the market to compete on price because Google subsidizes their product with ads. Thats the very picture of predatory, anticompetitive behavior. You can’t know what the market would be if Android were forced to compete fairly.
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.
As modern capitalism goes, Meta is not on the low end of the scale WRT whatever we're calling ethical in a system that has legal penalties for leaving money on the table.
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.
I don’t really know the rules of evidence, but I don’t think this is coming directly from Meta, nor that they’re allowed to review these documents themselves. The subpoena has to come from the court, and so I imagine it’s the court reviewing the documents, not Meta. I sure hope that’s how it works. I’d love for a lawyer to chime in, though.
? It is literally coming from Meta. That's what the subpoena and court filings that are screenshotted on that page show. Meta sought the subpoena, the court granted it, and now Simula has to testify at a deposition where the questions will be asked by Meta.
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.
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.
IANAL, but I would imagine that at the very least, Meta's lawyers would need to be able to see the documentation so that they can adequately prepare their argument/defense.
