Hi, I'm Dan Pramak, and welcome to a special pop-up episode of Axios Recap.

Today is Wednesday, December 9th, and earlier this afternoon, the Federal Trade Commission

and 48 state attorneys general sued Facebook for antitrust violations, arguing that the company

illegally hurt competition by buying small rivals

and engaging in other harmful behaviors. Moreover, the lawsuit asks that Facebook spin off

both Instagram and WhatsApp, basically asking the company to unwind its two most significant

and fairly old mergers. So we wanted to have a quick conversation about

what just happened and what it all means with two Axios reporters, Ashley Gold, who covers

tech policy for us from Washington, D.C., and Scott Rosenberg, who covers Silicon Valley,

from Silicon Valley. Ashley, we were expecting there to be some sort of antitrust action this afternoon against

Facebook. But did this go further than what a lot of people were anticipating?

Previous reporting showed that some of the things we were expecting today did indeed come to

fruition. But it did go pretty far. You've got the

FTC asking a federal court to have Facebook divest two major acquisitions, WhatsApp and Instagram.

That's not something we were sure the FTC was going to ask for, but they are in quite plain

language. In addition to that, the New York state AG,

Letitia James, said that she wants to make sure that other tech companies know not to act like

Facebook or the law will be coming down on them. So this is some pretty aggressive moves from

antitrust regulators today. Scott, you covered the old Microsoft trial in the past.

Obviously, Google just got hit with antitrust from the feds recently,

although not asked to divest anything.

From your gut take, from seeing what you've seen so far,

...