The FTC is worried that the big tech firms will further entrench their monopolies. They are doing a lot of good stuff lately; an underappreciated boon of the Biden Presidency. Lina Khan looks to be really set on fixing decades of mistakes.

I guess they just want to know if these deals lock out potential competitors.

Poor spez. If it wasn’t for bad luck, he’d have no luck at all.

Just kind of dawned on me while looking at the number, Reddit's licensing deal with Google is valued at $60 million per year. That's really not very much money at all, considering the amount of data Reddit has and continues to accumulate. And chump change for Google, no doubt. Reveals how little leverage Reddit actually has at this point. This was their flagship deal, and the best they could get was $60mil per year.

Also puts the API fiasco in a new light. "Look, we need to charge for API calls, because we need to restrict public access to data as a precondition of selling all your shit in a few months to Google, for the financial equivalent of a cup of coffee."

Something might happen, maybe…

Maybe a few years in the clink will teach Steve a little humility.

Does this have any impact on the IPO? Would they have to delay it (again)?

I feel like the whole Reddit AI deal is a trap. If any real judgment comes down about data use Reddit is an easy scapegoat. There was basically nothing stopping them from scraping the site for free.