5 ms·
What Instagram is doing is borderline illegal. Facebook sat in stasis for years without innovating their products. Now they are using their incumbent position
by CorduroyBottom 10y ago
What Instagram is doing is borderline illegal.
Facebook sat in stasis for years without innovating their products. Now they are using their incumbent position to steal every single snapchat feature with impunity.
Of course that's par for the course in tech. Where the giant companies throw their weight around to crush competition.
Will there be an antitrust suit?
- multibit 10y agoEven if Snap wins a lawsuit like that, it's hard to imagine a judgement requiring Instagram to remove the copied features.
- John23832 10y agoA judgement would never make them remove the features. The judgement (if reached) would award Snapchat rights (generally for a long term, up to or including perpetuity) that Facebook would then have to pay for. The removal may could come from the fact the Facebook would do that math and see that paying for the rights isn't worth it (their math would never really say that... they would pay).
- martinko 10y agoThere is nothing immoral about what they are doing. Why should snapchat have a monopoly on functionality?
- CorduroyBottom 10y agoFacebook is the one with a monopoly. They're clearly abusing their privileged position to stifle competition. It also sets a very poor precedent for entrepreneurial people.
- elastic_church 10y agoSo your argument is that monopolies are illegal? hahaha go back to wikipedia you're regurgitating some media version of a Microsoft case that you never read yourself
- dang 10y agoWe've banned this account for violating the site guidelines and ignoring our requests to stop.
- John23832 10y agoPatents grant temporary monopolies. (I don't know if Snapchat has any patents that apply here though.)
- babesh 10y agoI don't think Snap came up with the idea of stories either. They did it with better polish than previous ones to market. Small company comes up with idea, bigger company copies them, yet bigger company copies them. It has been going on for quite awhile. Remember Microsoft in the 90s?
- SamBam 10y agoWas Hacker News acting illegally when it took the idea of user-submitted stories displayed in a list, with voting, from Reddit/Slashdot/Whoever? Copying ideas is 3/4 of tech nowadays, whether it's a website design and features, or a social network, or a cab-hailing app (Uber, Lyft, etc etc). I think this is a good thing, because it allows creativity and competition within established ideas, instead of letting whoever came up with it first have a monopoly on it. Heck, I almost developed and released something almost identical to Pintrest before Pintrest came out. Good thing I didn't -- and wasn't allowed to claim some kind of rights on the idea -- because my version would have sucked. (Well, sucked in a different way from Pintrest does.)
- nebabyte 10y agoThis is basically the opposite of antitrust. In fact, it's one of the few instances of capitalism actually working the way it "works" on paper.