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- Mark Zuckerberg’s 1,000-plus words ‘open letter’ shows how single change in iPhone settings announced by Apple continues to hurt Meta even after 5 years
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Mark Zuckerberg’s 1,000-plus words ‘open letter’ shows how single change in iPhone settings announced by Apple continues to hurt Meta even after 5 years
TOI Tech Desk / TIMESOFINDIA.COM / Jul 30, 2026, 10:37 IST
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Mark Zuckerberg spent more than a thousand words in The Wall Street Journal this week arguing that superintelligence should belong to everyone rather than a handful of institutions. Published on July 28, the op-ed is dressed up as philosophy. It talks about liberty, open inquiry, invention over automation, and what Zuckerberg calls a balance of power. It name-drops the Wright brothers and Michael Faraday. Read it once and it sounds like a founder thinking about the next century.Read it twice and it starts to sound like the longest thing Zuckerberg has ever written about a settings toggle. That toggle shipped in April 2021 inside iOS 14.5. Apple’s App Tracking Transparency asked iPhone users a simple question before an app could follow them across the internet, and most users said no. Meta’s then-CFO Dave Wehner put the 2022 damage at about $10 billion. On February 3, 2022, Meta stock collapsed 26.4% and lost over $232 billion in market value in a single session, the largest one-day wipeout in US stock market history at the time. Five years later, the man still writes like someone who remembers who owned the switch.
How one Apple privacy pop-up in iOS 14.5 rewired Meta’s entire advertising business
The mechanics were small. Apple restricted advertiser access to the IDFA, the identifier that let companies target ads and confirm whether an ad actually led to a sale. Ad measurement firm AppsFlyer found in late 2021 that roughly 62% of iPhone users were opting out. Facebook’s ad machine suddenly had worse aim and worse scorekeeping.Meta did not take it quietly. It bought full-page newspaper ads in December 2020 attacking the change, and its business pages argued small advertisers would be hit hardest, claiming they lost over 60% of sales per ad dollar without their own data. Sheryl Sandberg made the same case on the earnings call. None of it moved Apple, which does not sell ads and had spent a decade marketing privacy as a product feature.
Why Meta’s $232 billion lesson was really about who controls the platform
The financial hit was brutal, but the strategic lesson was worse. Meta discovered it was a tenant. Billions in revenue depended on rules written by a company it does not control, changed on a schedule it does not set, with no appeal. Facebook even admitted it had no real choice but to display Apple’s prompt, because refusing meant risking removal from the App Store.That quarter also brought Facebook’s first-ever decline in daily users and Q1 guidance of $27-29 billion against Wall Street’s $30 billion-plus. TikTok was eating Reels’ lunch. The metaverse pivot was months old. Everything that has defined Meta since traces back to that stretch.
Zuckerberg’s superintelligence argument is an argument against gatekeepers, again
Now look at what the WSJ piece actually argues. Concentrated power stifles potential. A handful of institutions holding superintelligence would inevitably shape economics, science and politics. Open access, he writes, has historically been better for security than closed systems, citing open-source software. There is a neat thought experiment about a courtroom where only one side has a superintelligent lawyer.Strip out the philosophy and the structure is familiar. It is the ATT fight with better vocabulary. In 2021, one company owned the layer everyone else built on, and Meta was on the wrong side of it. Zuckerberg is now making sure the AI era does not repeat the arrangement, and Meta’s open-weight Llama strategy is the insurance policy. He does concede that biological risks need government coordination, which is the one place the openness argument gets uncomfortable.
Meta’s AI spending is testing investor patience all over again
The timing is awkward. Meta shares have been under pressure as investors question the scale of its AI capex, and this week’s tape showed Microsoft rising while Meta sold off. Zuckerberg is asking the market to fund a philosophy, and the market has heard him make a big structural bet before.What the op-ed does not say is what happens if the bet works. If everyone gets a personal superintelligence, Meta still has to be the one distributing it, and distribution has always been where the company makes its money. Llama being open does not make Meta’s platforms neutral. It makes them the default place a lot of people will meet the technology, which is a very different thing from a balance of power.That is the part still unresolved. In 2021 Meta learned what it costs to build on someone else’s rules. Whether it is now writing rules of its own, or genuinely handing them over, is a question the next few earnings calls will answer more honestly than 1,000 words in a newspaper.Get the latest technology news and updates. Download the TOI App.
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