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> For example, when Mr. Zuckerberg met with the founders of startups, including Evan Spiegel, chief executive of Snap, and Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursqu

• goodluckchuck 7y ago
  Yep, there's the antitrust angle, but then these threats were allegedly made by Mr. Zuckerberg personally which would make it attempted extortion. https://statelaws.findlaw.com/california-law/california-extortion-laws.html https://statelaws.findlaw.com/california-law/california-exto...
• toxik 7y ago
  I don’t see the problem with this. Isn’t it fair market competition? Facebook had (and has) deeper pockets and more users, so they won against Snap and Foursquare. Their acquisition of IG and WA were great moves too, it’s almost impossible to escape the Facebook and Google internet.
  • aswanson 7y ago
    It's rather easy. Delete your fb and use bing + ddg. Done.
    • Kuinox 7y ago
      Then you go on your news outlet and meet your friendly facebook "like" button that keep stalking you.
      • s_y_n_t_a_x 7y ago
        uBlock w/ social filter
        • rubbingalcohol 7y ago
          Yeah it's quite easy to block social widgets, trackers and the like. A more extreme approach is blocking scripts by default and whitelisting sites you want. Finally don't accept cookies from remote origins, and you're pretty (but not totally) well covered against trackers.
    • caseysoftware 7y ago
      And throw in https://adnauseam.io/ https://adnauseam.io/ to taint the underlying ad/tracking data.
  • VHRanger 7y ago
    There are many economists that think the acquisition of IG should have warranted antitrust. This is a good case on it: https://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1139&context=bblj https://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?art...
    • denzil_correa 7y ago
      We don’t even need to go that far. Facebook snooped in users via an advertised VPN app to make WhatsApp and Instagram acquisitions. That in itself should be enough fodder to discuss them. https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-onavo-gives-social-media-firm-inside-peek-at-rivals-users-1502622003 https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-onavo-gives-social-me...
      • skinnymuch 7y ago
        Instagram was way before Onavo acquisition. WhatsApp was officially announced as an acquisition 4 months after Onavo purchase. The article does say insiders say they used Onavo for WhatsApp purchase decision. However I’m assuming you don’t do a $19B acquisition (and 10% of your market cap) in a month. Wouldn’t Facebook have already been close to or starting the process of trying to buy WhatsApp before the end of 2013? Onavo was announced as a purchase in mid Oct 2013.
    • skinnymuch 7y ago
      I tried seeing where it stated that. I don’t see it. Instagram was a relatively tiny iPhone app back in 2012. Two years old and 30M users.
  • ssivark 7y ago
    I think it's more nuanced, and goes beyond just the content of the quoted excerpt. While copying the features (acceptable market competition), did Facebook leverage/abuse their monopoly status to prevent users from migrating to the upstart with better features? Further, are users being kept on Instagram using better features, or by abusing network effects? If it's the latter, then I would consider that a clear target for antitrust litigation. And preventing users from switching products while you catch-up (or not) seems squarely in that ballpark.
  • khawkins 7y ago
    If these features were critical enough that you could found a company on them, then clearly they brought innovation to the scene. If they had not come along, it's unclear as to whether Facebook would have ever introduced those features in their products. "Fair market competition" is the idea that products compete on their own merits, not that you can leverage your market position to destroy competitors. "Deeper pockets" is certainly antithetical to fair competition even if it's a reality we must sometimes accept. Exploiting the fact that you have "more users" should probably also be looked at as anti-competitive since it certainly doesn't benefit consumers by locking people into exclusive platforms. Are we really going to resign ourselves to the idea that FAANG will now and forever own nearly all the internet? What good are the "principles" of "free market competition" if we allow consolidation to effectively eliminate the market?
    • joe_the_user 7y ago
      "Fair market competition" is the idea that products compete on their own merits, not that you can leverage your market position to destroy competitors. This idea implies something akin to an implicit patent on every imaginable product "merit". But I should remind you that patents are not intended to be free market devices - rather, if a patent is granted, it is monopoly given in exchange for an individual describing their honest advancement of the craft. If Snap deserved a patent on their "business process", they could have stopped Facebook, if not, there's no reason that a deep pocketed entity shouldn't look at modest innovations and copy them. The alternative is every small innovation is controlled by a petty dictator, blocking all progress.
    • krustyburger 7y ago
      I think FAANG is less useful as an abbreviation these days because it includes Netflix. I don’t think Netflix is guilty of much of anything sinister, at least by anyone’s reckoning except certain movie and tv studio executives.
      • smsx 7y ago
        While that’s a good point, if the alternative is going around and using the acronym FAAG I think we can stick with the original.
  • smacktoward 7y ago
    It may be competition, but it certainly isn't fair competition. As you note, Facebook has much deeper pockets than even a well-funded startup. They can afford to build a clone of your product and give it away for free, without any expectation of even future revenue, specifically to drive you out of business. And they can bundle their clone with their already-popular apps, so people never even feel the need to check out your original product since they have a "good enough" version placed right at their doorstep. This is the exact same playbook that Microsoft used to strangle many, many promising companies back in the '80s and '90s: Stac Electronics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics), WordPerfect, Netscape, the list goes on and on. It's just impossible to successfully compete with someone who has an endless supply of money and can stand as a gatekeeper between you and your potential customers.
    • ummonk 7y ago
      Would we prefer a world where disk compression, document editors, and web browsers weren't available as free apps? There seems to be a fine line between price-dumping that ends up hurting consumers once competitors are driven out of business, and aggressive competition that benefits consumers by driving down prices and increasing availability.
    • joe_the_user 7y ago
      Efficient markets have never been about absolute fairness. There's no industry that has been built without the attempted participation of deep pocketed enterprises from earlier, related industries - adding machine companies (like IBM) naturally wanted to jump into computers. The system we live under is capitalism. It's aims are to provide profits to those who invest their existing wealth in innovations. If those with wealth can't use it to gain more wealth, they have no incentive to use it. The government steps in when a given enterprise meets the definition of monopoly - IE, actually prevent new entries into a field (Microsoft met this definition). Google and Facebook are unpopular but I'd say it's pretty clear they don't meet the definition of monopolies preventing entry into their industry (at least on the net, Android is another matter).
      • 7y ago
  • simias 7y ago
    It's fairly easy to escape Facebook and Google in the grand scheme of things. A lot easier than avoiding, say, Nestlé or Coca Cola IRL. It's easier to change your homepage than your dietary habits. The problem is convincing people that they need to switch, clearly the vast majority doesn't care enough to download Firefox or make two click in their settings to change the default search engine.
  • misiti3780 7y ago
    I dont use foursquare but I dont think they won there. There data is being used all over the place -no?
  • empath75 7y ago
    > Isn’t it fair market competition? Exploiting a monopoly in one segment in order to capture another is text book unfair competition.
    • wombat-man 7y ago
      I mean, they're competing social networks.
    • SkyMarshal 7y ago
      Exactly, that's illegal under US anti-trust law. It's called product tying. It's legal to achieve a monopoly by competitive means, via pure excellence in product and operations. But it's illegal to then attempt to achieve another monopoly in a different product by tying it to your legal monopoly product. That was part of the US DoJ suit against Microsoft in the 90s.
  • mliker 7y ago
    Agreed. Facebook came out with the Newsfeed, and now nearly every social product has a newsfeed: MyFitnessPal, Twitter, Venmo, etc.
  • DSingularity 7y ago
    It is until it isn’t. That came when Facebook deliberately targeted these young with policies whose obvious intent is to choke the growth of competitors before they attain critical mass. For example, policies which penalized content producers if they linked to Snapchat accounts.
  • arthurcolle 7y ago
    I kind of agree with you. More specifically, to your example, would Snapchat, Whatsapp, etc, have been served well in this case by specifically patenting their implementations of specific features? Like Facebook just totally ripped off Tinder with their new Dating feature -- could Match have just patented the profile with heart/pass buttons and then have grounds to sue?
  • burtonator 7y ago
    It's anti-competitive behavior. There's no such thing as a fair market when one player has a monopoly. I'm actually not in favor of anti-trust law and breaking up large companies. We should just properly tax them so that they can't grow this large.
  • Iv 7y ago
    Fair market competition is not possible if one actor is in a monopoly position. And I am curious to read what economic theory says about competition over a free product. I mean, I understand their revenues come from advertisers, but they are trying to get users, for free, like if it were a market competition. I wonder how much this model holds water in that case.
  • braindead_in 7y ago
    Fair market competition is dead. It has been for a long time. Companies use every trick in the book to gain advantage, ethics be damned. Fair market competition was the first casualty of Neoliberalism when companies took greed is good to their heart and focused only on increasing shareholder wealth. Ayn Rand must be spinning in her grave now.
  • mikekchar 7y ago
    Just thought I'd post a supporting post to contrast the posts saying the move is unfair. Imagine that Facebook wanted to have that functionality. They offer to buy the companies involved, but the companies ask for an unfair price ("1 million dollars!"). Should Facebook be compelled to pay that price? If they do not wish to pay that price, should they be forbidden from entering the market? Should Snap or Foursquare have a monopoly against any competitor that might be able to out compete them? We can say that Facebook has a monopoly, but does that mean they should be forbidden from entering any new (to them) markets? We can say that they have a lot more money than their competition. Does that mean that they should be forbidden from competing? I don't think any of that makes sense. I think what people are concerned about is the idea that Facebook will abuse their market position to compete unfairly. I think it's reasonable to fear that, but I don't think you can shut them down a priori. We don't have thought police yet. You can't be punished for something you haven't done yet. If the argument is that Facebook should be punished for their past actions and forbidden from entering new markets, that's an argument that at least makes sense (I'm not sure I agree with it, though). I just can't understand any argument that says that lacking such a punishment, Facebook has to refrain from entering markets that they didn't create. If we had such a mechanism in place, I think the potential for serious abuse would far exceed what Facebook has done to this point. In fact, I think we would be encouraging companies that act even more irresponsibly than the bad actors we have now in the market place. I can't really see an upside.
• atarian 7y ago
  Steve Jobs made a similar offer to Dropbox.
• threeseed 7y ago
  This is implicit in almost every acquisition though. It's one of the first things any investor will ask you which is how you can you defend your product from duplication by a larger company. If you are a company that overly relies on a single feature e.g. Snap stories then of course you will be more sensitive to threats like Facebook presented.
• deleted 7y ago
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