Facebook says the antitrust lawsuits targeting the company’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp should be dismissed. The company issued its first official response to antitrust charges from the Federal Trade Commission and 46 state attorneys general, saying that the government was seeking a “do-over.” Facebook filed motions to dismiss both cases.

In a statement, the company said neither lawsuit had made a credible case for antitrust. “Antitrust laws are intended to promote competition and protect consumers,” Facebook wrote. “These complaints do not credibly claim that our conduct harmed either.” The response comes three months after the company was hit with antitrust charges from the FTC and the state attorneys general.

Both cases allege that Facebook has engaged in anti-competitive behavior and that its deals to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp were meant to neutralize companies it saw as a threat. Facebook said this amounted to a do-over as both acquisitions were scrutinized, and approved, by the FTC years ago.

In a new court filing, Facebook’s lawyers say that the FTC “has not alleged facts amounting to a plausible antitrust case,” and that the charges come amid a “fraught environment of relentless criticism of Facebook for matters entirely unrelated to antitrust concerns.” Regarding the case from state AGs, Facebook says that the states “lack standing to bring the case” and that they “waited far too long to act.” In its motion to dismiss the state charges, Facebook referred to the states’ case as “afterthought claims.”

In addition to its acquisitions, both cases also pointed to Facebook’s platform policies, and how it treated third-party developers. The state case and the FTC lawsuit both called out Facebook’s treatment of Twitter-owned Vine, which saw its access to Facebook’s API cut off in 2013 in a decision that was approved by Mark Zuckerberg. In its motion to dismiss the FTC case, Facebook lawyers said the company “had no duty to make its platform available to any other app.”

The FTC and the state AGs have until April to respond to Facebook’s motions to dismiss. As The Wall Street Journal points out, actually getting the charges dismissed before a trial requires Facebook to “meet a high legal standard” that may be difficult to clear. Even if it did, a dismissal would hardly be the end of Facebook’s antitrust woes. The company is also facing an antitrust investigation from Congress and regulators in the European Union.

OKdo’s focus is to create an ‘outstanding’ experience for all microcontroller and IoT customers, whatever their background, goals and ambitions. Bringing them the latest products, solutions and ideas to inspire and enable them to create technology that makes life better.

Visit OKdo’s new website to see the Arduino based inspirational Industrial case study where Fluid Intelligence’s oil performance monitoring service enables  industrial customers in the Logistics, Pulp & Paper, Manufacturing, Chemical and Energy sectors to maximise their operational reliability and reduce the waste generated by up to 50%

Massimo Banzi, CTO and Co-founder of Arduino explains: “We’re excited to be partnering with OKdo. With our roots in open source, Arduino has transformed into a company that serves professional designers by providing complete IoT platforms, as well as continuing to enable students, educators and makers to innovate by making complex technology simple to use.  There are a lot of Enterprises that need simple and secure technology for adding connectivity to their devices, together, Arduino and OKdo can make that happen.”

Richard Curtin, SVP Technology at OKdo commented  “At OKdo we’re excited to work with Arduino to help them meet their objectives and grow their business. We support makers, entrepreneurs, start-ups and global businesses turn their visions into reality. Like Arduino, the philosophy behind OKdo is to put technology in the hands of those who have the biggest potential. Together with Arduino we can work with customers and businesses to help them do something amazing.”

To find out more about OKdo visit  https://www.okdo.com/industrial/ or follow them on Twitter | YouTube | LinkedIn | Facebook | Instagram.

Who owns Arduino? We don’t mean metaphorically — we’d say that’s the community of users and developers who’ve all contributed to this amazing hardware/software ecosystem. We mean literally. Whose chips are on the table? Whose money talks? It looks like it could be ARM!

The Arduino vs Arduino saga “ended” just under a year ago with an out-of-court settlement that created a private holding company part-owned by both parties in the prior dispute over the trademark. And then, [Banzi] and the original founders bought out [Musto]’s shares and took over. That much is known fact.

The murky thing about privately held companies and out-of-court settlements is that all of the details remain private, so we can only guess from outside. We can speculate, however, that buying out half of the Arduino AG wasn’t cheap, and that even pooling all of their resources together, the original founders just didn’t have the scratch to buy [Musto] out. Or as the Arduino website puts it, “In order to make [t]his a reality, we needed a partner that would provide us with the resources to regain full ownership of Arduino as a company… and Arm graciously agreed to support us to complete the operation.” That, and the rest of the Arduino blog post, sure looks like ARM provided some funds to buy back Arduino.

We reached out to [Massimo Banzi] for clarification and he replied:

“Hi arm did not buy nor invest in arduino. The founders + Fabio Violante still own the company. As I wrote in the blog post we are still independent, open source and cross platform.”

We frankly can’t make sense of these conflicting statements, at least regarding whether ARM did or didn’t contribute monetary resources to the deal. ARM has no press release on the deal as we write this.

Announcing a partnership without details isn’t a new activity for Arduino. Recently we wrote about open questions on the Arduino Foundation. [Banzi] was willing to speak with Hackaday at length about that topic, suggesting more details were just weeks away but we have yet to see follow-through on that.

What we can tell is that [Banzi] and Arduino want us to know that they’re still independent. The Arduino post mentions independence and autonomy eight times in a 428-word post. (The lady doth protest too much?) They’re very concerned that we don’t think that they’ve been snapped up by ARM.

And there’s also good reason to believe that Arduino will remain autonomous even if ARM owns a big stake. ARM sells its intellectual property to a number of silicon manufacturers, who then compete fiercely by offering different peripheral sets and power budgets, and they’re very serious about providing them all with a level playing field.

Anyway, the various ARM chips are nice to work with from a hacker perspective. If the AVR-based UNO was the last non-ARM Arduino board ever made, we’d only shed a tiny little tear. On the other hand, if you’re an MSP430 or PIC fanboy or fangirl, we wouldn’t be holding your breath for a light-blue board sporting your favorite silicon but that is just conjecture.

So we have seemingly conflicting information on the details of this deal, but also promises of openness and transparency. On one hand we’re pleased that ARM is the apparent silent partner, but on the other hand we’re left confused and wanting more. Who owns Arduino?

We love to see projects undertaken for the pure joy of building something new, but to be honest those builds are a dime a dozen around here. So when we see a great build that also aims to enhance productivity and push an entrepreneurial effort along, like this automated small parts counter, we sit up and take notice.

The necessity that birthed this invention is [Ryan Bates’] business of building DIY arcade game kits. The mini consoles seen in the video below are pretty slick, but kitting the nuts, bolts, spacers, and other bits together to ship out orders was an exercise in tedium. Sure, parts counting scales are a thing, but that’s hardly a walk-away solution. So with the help of some laser-cut gears and a couple of steppers, [Ryan] built a pretty capable little parts counter.

The interchangeable feed gears have holes sized to move specific parts up from a hopper to a chute. A photointerrupter counts the parts as they fall into plastic cups on an 8-position carousel, ready for bagging. [Ryan] also has a manual counter for wire crimp connectors that’s just begging to be automated, and we can see plenty of ways to leverage both solutions as he builds out his kitting system.

While we’ve seen more than a few candy sorting machines lately, it’s great to see someone building hardware to streamline the move from hobby to business like this. We’re looking forward to seeing where [Ryan] takes this from here.