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FTC Sues Facebook for Illegal Monopolization

• minimaxir 6y ago
  Key line: > The FTC is seeking a permanent injunction in federal court that could, among other things: require divestitures of assets, including Instagram and WhatsApp
  • zamalek 6y ago
    Oh that's awesome. I haven't been able to pry my family away from those two, even though they openly admit that Facebook is evil/sucks.
  • mmastrac 6y ago
    Splitting those two properties off would be fantastic. I know it's a pipe dream, but an independent Oculus would make me so happy. I suspect this is impossible due to the early nature of the VR market. Maybe just an FTC requirement _not_ to require a FB login?
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • gamblor956 6y ago
      Unfortunately, after skimming through the PDF of the complaint (https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/1910134fbcomplaint.pdf https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/cases/1910134fbco...), it appears the FTC is not seeking that remedy. It appears VR is still too small of a market for them to care about.
      • vosper 6y ago
        Also, Facebook doesn't have a monopoly on VR - there are several competitors in the market, like HTC and Valve.
        • bogwog 6y ago
          Yeah, and that might be because Valve is too expensive for them to buy.
          • spdionis 6y ago
            Valce is also probably not for sale.
            • ascagnel_ 6y ago
              There's also a bunch of social features embedded in the Steam client; I wouldn't be surprised if regulators took exception to any acquisition by another company with a social network.
      • jcfrei 6y ago
        Seems a bit short-sighted because if Oculus becomes the dominant VR platform that Facebook envisions it to be then it's going to dwarf instagram in terms of economic importance (for advertisers and users) over the long term.
        • paxys 6y ago
          The flip side of it is that VR isn't mature enough for a company like Oculus to succeed independently. Having the resources of Facebook behind it will help the VR market as a whole (for now).
        • kossae 6y ago
          I think the FTC will deal with that as it comes. Including that in this case would be speculating the future of the Oculus business.
        • freehunter 6y ago
          That's a big if, one that hinges on way too many things to be able to successfully argue in court about: 1) VR ever becoming a huge player. It might. It might not. Right now there's no real evidence that VR will actually become a big deal, and Facebook could argue that this is a niche offering that can't be anti-competitive because there's no real market yet. 2) The feasibility of VR technology independent of major vendors. There's a strong possibility that without a huge R&D budget VR will never overcome the hurdles that might keep it out of the mainstream. Facebook could argue that removing Oculus would doom VR to failure in the market. 3) The Sirus/XM merger removed 100% of satellite radio competition (there's only one vendor left after the merger), but both Sirius and XM successfully argued that the market isn't big enough to support multiple vendors. Facebook could argue a similar case, that for the health of the VR market there should be fewer competitors. I'm not a lawyer so I don't know if any of those would be winning arguments, but based on previous anti-trust cases I've followed that would be the strategy I would expect. And it might be why the FTC didn't go down that path.
    • tempsy 6y ago
      Pretty sure the focus is on Instagram and Whatsapp only, not Oculus.
    • SerLava 6y ago
      Ugh, yeah Facebook probably bought Oculus thinking: -What if a lot of people use these in the future -What if they're really comfy when they get slim, and people use them all the time, even for essentially web browsing. -Later models can easily have internal and mouth facing cameras so you can smile at people in VR -Let's intimately observe the finest twitch of every expression felt by our users, peering deep into their minds, learning more about how to manipulate and destroy humans than anyone ever thought possible.
      • SerLava 6y ago
        I'm getting down votes here, does anyone really think Facebook wouldn't do this?
        • annadane 6y ago
          You're getting downvotes from apologists and shills
      • dane-pgp 6y ago
        "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a VR headset worn on a human face - forever." (Apologies to George Orwell.)
      • retromario 6y ago
        Their thinking is pretty much all laid out in the 2015 Zuckerberg memo on VR/AR: https://twitter.com/lucasmtny/status/1095861887588229120?s=20 https://twitter.com/lucasmtny/status/1095861887588229120?s=2...
        • shostack 6y ago
          Ava the Oculus Connect 6 keynote video on YouTube.
      • Applejinx 6y ago
        Damn straight. The prospect of how much you can learn about human reactions is INCREDIBLE. Eye and mouth tracking is everything, here: it would be turning a wide variety of human behavior study into Big Data and straightforward machine learning. What would you do with it? What wouldn't you do with it?
    • jfb 6y ago
      Oculus doesn't present a monopoly concern in advertising, though.
      • sharkweek 6y ago
        Just wait until you slip into the Oculus 5 and enjoy a movie night with your friends anywhere in the world! Oh what’s that? Your eyes looked at the logo on the shirt the hero is wearing, are you perhaps interested in learning more about where you could buy it?
        • csunbird 6y ago
          Or, if the Oculus becomes the most popular VR equipment, think about the advertising can be shown to people in VR Chat rooms, VR films, virtual cinemas..... all bound to a single company.
    • justapassenger 6y ago
      > I know it's a pipe dream, but an independent Oculus would make me so happy While that would cool for short-term, independent Oculus can stagnate. VR still needs many more billions to be truly usable, and I don't think independent company will be able to fund it.
      • djrogers 6y ago
        > independent Oculus can stagnate My experience has been that technology is far more likely to stagnate at BigCo than SmallCo - especially if SmallCo's only source of revenue is said technology.
        • thebigman433 6y ago
          I think down the line that would be true, but Facebook's willingness to burn literal billions of dollars at this point is basically the only thing carrying VR. Id love to see it split off in the future though.
          • Barrin92 6y ago
            I'm not sure big money is what is needed to create a flourishing VR sector. The appeal of VR has always been creating virtual experiences that are different and unique. honestly I think it makes much more sense for that scene to be decentralised and independent. Kind of like Minecraft came about, I have trouble imagining it as some sort big money project. I don't think the issue with VR at this point is so much technical than it is that nobody's yet been creative enough to make something truly unique with it.
            • arxpoetica 6y ago
              Agree. VR is not more than a novelty and gaming tool yet. Gaming is a huge potential, but I think the real use cases haven't been proven out yet. I'm still a believer, but I suspect there are other non-VR technologies that either need to catch up or just figure out how to dovetail for VR to be anything other than a novelty.
    • rolph 6y ago
      considering some of the things that facebook has been used for it should be very careful about what it does with VR/AR and the potential for use as a HUD facilitating an attacker and providing them with a support team
    • cynoclast 6y ago
      I was interested in VR before FB bought Oculus and was considering it as an option. But the instant FB bought it I wrote it off as an option because I knew there would be fuckery down the road. And guess what? If FB bans the FB account you're forced to link your Oculus to you, can't use it anymore. Unbelievable behvior.
  • codetrotter 6y ago
    From a privacy point of view I agree that it sounds like a good thing and I hope it happens. From an entrepreneurial point of view I wonder how it will affect the future of big tech players acquiring other companies.
    • sneak 6y ago
      From a privacy point of view it doesn't matter who collects it so long as the FBI and US military can retrieve it on-demand without a warrant or probable cause under FAA 702.
      • yur3i__ 6y ago
        I disagree with this. Privately owned threats are still a big deal, even if government threats also exist.
    • lowdose 6y ago
      It should be forbidden after IPO to acquire other companies because of this kills competition before it has the chance to compete.
      • deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
      • ggreer 6y ago
        Then no companies would IPO.
    • vmception 6y ago
      > From an entrepreneurial point of view I wonder how it will affect the future of big tech players acquiring other companies. It won't. The full power of the United States does not reverse all those shares you sold to a big tech company, or sold as a big shareholder of a big tech company. If the market tolerates a price, based on their own exuberance and view of future revenues, that is fine here, and the incentives will continue to promote near term profits with a who-gives-a-shit slim possibility of cleanup by the regulators. Corporations are just a conduit for money, and the regulators only enforce actions on the conduit, and thats a maybe.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • SerLava 6y ago
    Huge. I'm glad Zuckerberg is probably panicking.
    • samfisher83 6y ago
      Even if they were three separate companies wouldn't Mark still have voting control of all three companies?
      • SerLava 6y ago
        I don't think so? Can anyone answer this definitively?
        • dsr_ 6y ago
          The FTC could, potentially, require: 1. That FB split into N independent companies, whereupon each share of FB would become 1 share in each of N companies. 2. That the supermajor shareholders (say, more than 10% of any company) each pick at most one company to retain that interest in, and sell off shares in the other companies until they had less than 10% of each of those). 3. That the new companies avoid overlapping directors. It would be a long time in court. See the breakup of AT&T.
          • lotsofpulp 6y ago
            And then it would eventually come back together. See ATT. https://money.cnn.com/infographic/technology/att-merger-history/ https://money.cnn.com/infographic/technology/att-merger-hist...
            • mrkramer 6y ago
              "And then it would eventually come back together." That would be hilarious.
            • katbyte 6y ago
              But are there not multiple phone companies now instead of just one?
  • claudeganon 6y ago
    Will splitting off Instagram make a meaningful difference given how little protections there are around selling advertising data? I agree we would’ve been better off if they had never been allowed to buy Instagram AND we had meaningful laws in place, but I don’t see how this fundamentally changes things given where we are now.
  • Erik816 6y ago
    If only there were some kind of federal agency, maybe a "trade commission" that could have blocked these mergers when they originally happened ....
    • JxLS-cpgbe0 6y ago
      The FTC allowed the IG merger because * No ads (lol) * Competition from Google even if it did have ads * FB had no competitive photo app
    • ergocoder 6y ago
      When they originally happened, people thought Zuck was insane. Instagram for $1B? WhatsApp for $17B? Really? FTC definitely isn't competent enough to understand how visionary the acquisition was. To be fair, not many was that competent. Otherwise, Google and other cash-loaded companies would have acquired these companies with higher offer. It could have easily been Twitter + Vines + Periscope where the acquired products went nowhere. It's unfair to Zuck for being very visionary about this. But antitrust isn't about being fair to an individual company...
      • madeofpalk 6y ago
        > When they originally happened, people thought Zuck was insane. Maybe that's a sign that the acquisitions deserved more scrutiny?
        • deleted 6y ago
          [deleted]
      • majani 6y ago
        To be fair, that Whatsapp deal still looks insane. Still no meaningful revenue coming from that end 8 years later
        • will_pseudonym 6y ago
          Except the revenue that they potentially would have been losing out on had they not acquired their competitor.
  • wlesieutre 6y ago
    Oculus too please! I'm holding off on merging my Oculus and Facebook accounts as long as possible in hopes that someone tells them to get the hell out of here with that nonsense.
• pcurve 6y ago
  FB is on a lot of chopping blocks lately it’s hard to keep track. I guess this won’t really help with the Diem
• vmception 6y ago
  Nice! They are also going after API terms of use! This decade is going to be lit.
• avs733 6y ago
  The long promised and teased suit is finally out in the wild. Interesting that it seems to focus so heavily on acquisitions.
• tempsy 6y ago
  I support this, though have low expectations the divestiture will actually happen. It would be quite the twist though if Kevin Systrom testified for the FTC against FB, though.
  • samfisher83 6y ago
    Why would it be a twist I thought Systrom is mad at Mark. I know what whatsapp guys don't like mark.
• calibas 6y ago
  They were flat out blocking any links to certain competitors. https://heavy.com/tech/2018/10/facebook-block-minds-com-unsecure/ https://heavy.com/tech/2018/10/facebook-block-minds-com-unse...
• Daho0n 6y ago
  And nothing will come of this except a slap on the wrist. I have more faith in the EU if fines are to be made big enough to make any difference at all.
  • cblconfederate 6y ago
    EU at most will just ban FB to allow local competitors to emerge. There's no point regulating american companies
  • CPLX 6y ago
    Arguable. The antitrust cases against MS had a real and profound effect on the development of the first round of internet companies in the late 90's and early 2000's, even though it never went to a trial and verdict.
• bearjaws 6y ago
  Would be interesting to see a modern day trust busting, wonder how deeply embedded Facebook's infrastructure / P&Ps is for Whatsapp development.
  • chx 6y ago
    Unless they rewrote Whatsapp from ground up, the two platforms are not mixed. Whatsapp is written in Erlang where Facebook has transitioned from PHP to Hack to the best of my knowledge.
    • Illniyar 6y ago
      the code isn't the only infrastructure that can intermingle. I think whatsapp runs on facebook's massive server farms with customized chips - which would hurt whatsapp probably if they need to find a different hosting. I imagine there are probably a lot of other services that are shared or interact in some way - maybe shared email/notification services, 2fa services, data analytics/BI, monitoring etc...
    • bun_at_work 6y ago
      I don't know how much they did with Whatsapp, but I do know they integrated the Facebook ad serving platform into Whatsapp. Breaking up Facebook and Whatsapp would cost Whatsapp that ad serving platform, which is probably nontrivial.
      • frabcus 6y ago
        The nice thing about splitting a software company (unlike a company with physical assets) is that you can fork the assets. Give both companies the ad platform source code.
• hans1729 6y ago
  Lets hope they push through with it and follow up with Google. Its about time - its ridiculous how incredibly powerful these institutions have become. Question: is there an argument not to split up these gigantic corporations?
  • hntcz 6y ago
    The way I see it, an important argument is that it won't solve the problem: these organizations take advantage of network effects to build monopolies and that mechanism won't go away. A good book on this is Who Owns The Future by Jaron Lanier. Of course, forbidding anti-competitive acquisitions would have helped in that maybe then we'd all be using an independent Instagram under the leadership of its original founders and Facebook would be dying. But that still wouldn't change the fact that it would be more than likely to be a quasi monopoly. That's just the nature of social networks.
  • belval 6y ago
    While they crush local competition, they also crush it in other countries. Google and Facebook/Whatsapp own a sizeable chunk of Internet interactions in just about every country except China, which in turns means more revenue which can be used to pay these insane Silicon Valley salaries to their workforce. While I don't like these monopolistic practices, they have given the US a tremendous amount of power over communications abroad.
  • dontblink 6y ago
    Yes. I would imagine it revolves around demonstrating harm. Just because something is big doesn't necessitate a break up.
  • adrr 6y ago
    Argument for FB not being broken up would be “how does it harm the consumer?”. Sherman act doesn’t ban monopolies, it’s protects the consumer from being abused by the monopoly.
  • julienb_sea 6y ago
    Yes, the argument is if you split them up their core value proposition is put into question. Apparently a very large group of users are on board with the core value proposition, and you are imposing on that group a ton of assumptions that the regulatory breakup and oversight will end up "working out better for everyone". These companies are also vulnerable to competition in a fickle market. Tik Tok has gained massive ground and is on a similar trajectory that instagram was on some years ago. For everyone's claiming that FB stifles innovation, we have an obvious counterexample happening literally before our eyes.
• TrainedMonkey 6y ago
  > ... Facebook has maintained its monopoly position by buying up companies that present competitive threats and by imposing restrictive policies that unjustifiably hinder actual or potential rivals that Facebook does not or cannot acquire Imagine if FB was broken up like old school monopolies. That would definitely open field to a lot of smaller social media startups. I am worried about consumer privacy impacts because it is easier to regulate one giant company than a myriad of smaller ones. Regardless, I say let's do it because monopolies and data stewardship are two separate problems and historically monopoly breakdowns did great things for innovation.
  • AlimJaffer 6y ago
    I could get behind this if the current ones actually followed regulation. FB are so entrenched that they don't have to follow the rules as they've demonstrated with Cambridge Analytica among a myriad of other issues with their platform.
  • cblconfederate 6y ago
    what if one of them used privacy as a selling point?
  • _tulpa 6y ago
    > ... easier to regulate one giant company than a myriad of smaller ones This sounds... incorrect. Small players are much more vulnerable to fines and other penalties which range from 'cost of doing business' to 'slap on the wrist' for the big guys. And small ones don't seem to have much in the way of lobbying power or other direct influence over regulators. Maybe more accurate to say that it's a bit harder to police lots of small players, but also that it's only the small players who produce good behaviour under regulation.
  • arrosenberg 6y ago
    I actually disagree. Regulating a single giant company becomes an exercise in compliance, which American governments are absolutely terrible at. The single giant company has the resources to fight any action that could existentially threaten it. This winds up in its' own set of abuses. In a robust market of smaller players the regulatory agencies can stick to rulemaking, investigation, and enforcement (civil fines/prosecutions), which is what they are great at. Smaller players don't have the resources to compete with the government and force them into regulatory trench warfare. This is similar to the situation with the IRS — they spend most of their time auditing EITC cases, and other issues related to poor and middle class people. They don't have the resources to collect on the billionaires who have enough power to fight the government to attrition.
• bpodgursky 6y ago
  Everyone's talking about divesting Instagram and WhatsApp, but I would much prefer that the FTC ordered Facebook to acquire and accidentally kill TikTok.
• gfodor 6y ago
  Instagram and WhatsApp are old news. The big chip on the board is Oculus. If they can get Facebook to sever Oculus (and Facebook "Reality Labs", something probably created ahead of this to blur the lines at bit) it would be a huge step forward to mitigate huge harms to come from Facebook.
  • cblconfederate 6y ago
    doubt it. oculus alone will fade to obscurity
    • gfodor 6y ago
      Seems unlikely to me unless you think your children are going to be using computers with flat screens on walls like we do today.
      • nitrogen 6y ago
        100%. Don't believe in the cyberpunk AR/VR future.
      • hundchenkatze 6y ago
        They said oculus would fade, not VR/AR in general.
      • matchbok 6y ago
        VR isn't a thing, and won't be. Just like 3d TVs. Nobody outside of tech cares about it.
        • xenihn 6y ago
          https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirvana-185306 https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv... http://www.mtv.com/news/2460774/miyamoto-wants-nintendo-to-focus-on-fun-not-online-gaming/ http://www.mtv.com/news/2460774/miyamoto-wants-nintendo-to-f...
        • 6y ago
• lbsnake7 6y ago
  When Facebook first went public, an older relative asked me if he should invest in Facebook. My only insight was being an internet user at the time and I said no, there was no reason that Facebook wouldn’t be another MySpace. Facebook's only value was their users and users were historically very finicky and moved around platforms at will. I argued that Facebook would make no money and wouldn’t be around in a couple of years. This obviously turned out wildly wrong but I always thought the user moat was always an issue and Facebook’s downfall would be related to it. I guess what this lawsuit says is that they essentially just bought their way out of people platform jumping.
  • Grazester 6y ago
    On the same note, a relative asked me the same thing when they IPO.I thought if Google could make money selling ads why couldn't Facebook. I bought in at IPO price for them. I sold for them about 2 years ago when the price was dropping due to privacy scandals.
    • annadane 6y ago
      Why the hell is HN so downvote happy?
      • easytiger 6y ago
        Reddit is here. It has been a swift decline notable in the last year or so. Sadly. Even fairly uncontroversial assertions of fact are downvoted frequently
        • kache_ 6y ago
          you know you are on orange reddit right?
        • folkrav 6y ago
          What a pretentious (and wildly indemonstrable) take.
• nickpp 6y ago
  Monopoly of what? Some other social networks I use every day or so: Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok and various forums and communities like this one, which in my mind are pretty similar to a social network. And since WhatsApp is a chat app, how about all the other chat apps I am using? iMessage, Slack, Teams. Does this action has any merit or is it just the usual political posturing and games?
  • chc 6y ago
    Could the average Facebook user readily replace their use of Facebook with LinkedIn or TikTok? I am not a big user of any of those products, but I have the distinct impression that the answer is no.
    • CPLX 6y ago
      The revenue generating customers of Facebook are not the social network's users.
    • fishtacos 6y ago
      From the FTC.gov[1]: "The antitrust laws prohibit conduct by a single firm that unreasonably restrains competition by creating or maintaining monopoly power. Most Section 2 claims involve the conduct of a firm with a leading market position, although Section 2 of the Sherman Act also bans attempts to monopolize and conspiracies to monopolize. As a first step, courts ask if the firm has "monopoly power" in any market. This requires in-depth study of the products sold by the leading firm, and any alternative products consumers may turn to if the firm attempted to raise prices. Then courts ask if that leading position was gained or maintained through improper conduct—that is, something other than merely having a better product, superior management or historic accident. Here courts evaluate the anticompetitive effects of the conduct and its procompetitive justifications." Does FB unreasonably restrain competition? (My answer is no) Does FB have an alternative? (Mewe/Parler/Gab etc. - Mewe being the most direct alternative) Then courts ask if that leading position was gained or maintained through improper conduct—that is, something other than merely having a better product, superior management or historic accident. - I'd say no. I don't see anything this lawsuit stands on. [1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-antitrust-laws/single-firm-conduct/monopolization-defined https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...
• jorgenveisdal 6y ago
  My guess is that this will end up the same was as the Microsoft case. Building network effects is not anti-competitive behavior. FB will argue that they are in fierce competition with Google in the market where they make their revenue, advertising. Not really relevant what the relative market concentration is in other non-revenue generating markets (social networking / search), which are only used to generate attention for the ads they sell in a market where FB's relative market power is < 50%.
• archeantus 6y ago
  So if the acquisition of IG and Whats App were wrong, why did they get regulatory approval at the time?
  • kevingadd 6y ago
    Because the people in charge were happy with them at the time
  • nerfhammer 6y ago
    IG was tiny at the time, not the behemoth it is today. They hadn't even released on Android yet.
• apozem 6y ago
  > The complaint also alleges that Facebook, over many years, has imposed anticompetitive conditions on third-party software developers’ access to valuable interconnections to its platform, such as the application programming interfaces (“APIs”) that allow the developers’ apps to interface with Facebook. In particular, Facebook allegedly has made key APIs available to third-party applications only on the condition that they refrain from developing competing functionalities, and from connecting with or promoting other social networking services. On one hand, forcing Facebook to open up its social graph would have serious privacy implications. On the other, it would provide an incredible boost to any new social network, which could quickly bootstrap off your existing friends. That's what Instagram did with Twitter and what Vine did with Facebook. The most important feature of a social network has always been whether your friends/family use it. If any new social network can take advantage of Facebook's social graph via API, that neutralizes this advantage. Now Facebook is forced to compete by being a better social network, not just a bigger one.
  • dane-pgp 6y ago
    > On one hand, forcing Facebook to open up its social graph would have serious privacy implications. There shouldn't be much additional privacy concern with a Facebook user saying "I trust user Alice and service example.com, so please send all my posts to alice@example.com using ActivityPub." Similarly, Alice should be able to tell example.com that she trusts the Facebook user Bob with ID 123456789, so that example.com sends her posts to Facebook addressed to Bob (perhaps authenticated with a pre-shared key that Bob emailed her). Once users are free to move between providers, those providers can compete based on their level of privacy and security, which right now Facebook has little incentive to improve.
    • brilee 6y ago
      I'd agree with you in theory, but in practice, those API endpoints end up being exploit vectors for data leakage in various ways - either through actual security vulns or through the security vulnerability that exists between the monitor and the chair.
    • spunker540 6y ago
• egonschiele 6y ago
  Good. Facebook owns so much of the ad market now, and their support is non-existent. They have run ads that I didn't want running at all, haven't let me pause them, and haven't responded to support requests through their platform or through social media. I am really worried about what happens if they keep growing.
• darth_avocado 6y ago
  Hilarious that FB is being targeted for Instagram and Whatsapp when there's plenty of competition in the market. And somehow Google get's a free pass and so does Amazon.
• artemisyna 6y ago
  Not a lawyer, but I'm really curious to see how this plays out. This case has a lot of confounding factors: * other companies/entities that can be considered "competitors" (Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, etc) * the acquisitions in question (Instagram and WhatsApp) being approved by the suing entity (namely, the FTC) themselves back in the day I wouldn't be surprised if an outcome of this were to be say, limits against cross-linking acquisitions together or the like in the future. However, having existing companies be forced to be spun out in their entirely... I have a hard time imagining that being the outcome, given the chilling effect it could have on the rest of the industry.
  • NikolaeVarius 6y ago
    This is the thing I have a hard time understanding, as far as I'm aware the FTC approved all this, these were not forceful takeovers. What would be the precedent if regulatory approvals could be challenged with a change in administration?
    • bogwog 6y ago
      > What would be the precedent if regulatory approvals could be challenged with a change in administration? That's like someone is approved for a license to own a gun, then that person uses the gun to commit a crime, and then their license is revoked. Then someone points the finger at whoever it was that approved that person for a gun license. What would be the precedent if a merger approval gave you a free pass to be anti-competitive?
      • artemisyna 6y ago
        I suppose the question then becomes "should the things that FB did with WhatsApp and Instagram since acquiring them be considered a crime"? I could see eyebrows being raised around interop work, but I'm not sure about the rest.
    • thraway12 6y ago
      The FTC is an executive agency with the enforcement equivalent of prosecutorial discretion. It's not a court.
• gazelleeatslion 6y ago
  This is so misdirected... We need transparency, not this. How is there not some sort of regulation to allow me to opt-out or configure these algorithms that target me for ads of curated content? It's my f*cking data!
  • shawnMer 6y ago
    I'm not trying to troll but the reaction to "It's my f*cking data!" should be to seriously look into projects like Urbit. Where you do in fact own and control your own data.
• misiti3780 6y ago
  Facebook.com. has such a shitty user experience, I'm I the only one surprised it still has so many MAUs? (This comment has nothing to do with Whatsapp and Instagram, just Facebook web)
• rtlfe 6y ago
  How would splitting Instagram work from a technical perspective? Engineers have spent 8 years building shared code and data centers for FB and IG. I'd expect it would take hundreds of people and multiple years to untangle them.
  • therealmarv 6y ago
    As far as I know the biggest change was hosting the pictures on Facebook server infrastructure. So it requires copying the pictures to another infrastructure and replacing the URLs ? Of course it will be a huge task but I don't think that FB and IG are sharing a lot of code.
    • dillondoyle 6y ago
      The biggest challenge would be the advertising. Moving photos is far easier. Replicating and building out an ad platform like FBs from zero would be very very hard. None of the other social platforms ad networks are even close in quality but especially interface/targeting/features. Snap / TW I would say are at maybe 5% if I had to pick a number... Especially especially taking into account integration with FB pixel.
    • rtlfe 6y ago
      Photo hosting might have been the biggest immediate change back in 2012, but since then there have been a lot of features added to IG that share a lot with FB. You've probably seen things like recommendations of people to follow in IG based on FB Pages that you've liked, etc. And video streaming infrastructure is shared, and that's much more complicated than photos.
  • crazygringo 6y ago
    The thing is, technically it's actually far more difficult to integrate than it is to separate. Facebook has been trying to make it appear that integration will make separation impossible. But the reality is, you simply duplicate the databases and whatever shared services they depend on, and create a "stub" FB backend for IG, and a "stub" IG backend for FB for the shared services to work... and they go on their merry independent ways, while engineers remove things that depend on the stubs at their leisure. Obviously it's not trivial (and involves the inherent complexities of any datacenter migration), and doing it without downtime is a whole separate beast, but it's not impossible or so wildly difficult it can't be carried out. In other words, there's zero reason it should be a factor in the legal outcome. At most, there would be an IP issue -- e.g. would the spun-out IG be permitted to have a stubbed FB backend, and vice-versa -- but that's easily solved by providing those permissions as part of the separation agreement, with a timeline to remove them (e.g. 2 years).
• ferdowsi 6y ago
  If you work at Facebook it's time to seriously consider leaving to avoid damage to your own brand. Future employers are going to be scrutinizing your record and will ask you difficult questions about why you stuck by Facebook despite an overwhelming consensus that they are damaging to the global social fabric.
  • dghlsakjg 6y ago
    For better or worse, I really doubt this matters. Even Bill Gates has cleaned up his reputation, let alone engineers who worked at MS in monopoly days. I don't think anyone that was there at the time is worried about how it reflects on them personally.
    • dane-pgp 6y ago
      > Even Bill Gates has cleaned up his reputation It's amazing what a few billion dollars of charitable donations can buy you. This is called "fumigating your fortune".
  • ipsocannibal 6y ago
    Sticking by Facebook now might be seen as a desirable trait in the eyes of some future employers. I'm looking at you Oracle.
    • leafmeal 6y ago
      A lack of conscience can be a very marketable trait ;)
  • PKop 6y ago
    > Future employers > damaging to the global social fabric I'm skeptical there'd be any hard feelings from other global corporations, arguably doing the same thing
  • kube-system 6y ago
    Maybe if you're in the c-suite or work in a CSR role. Nobody does this when they hire software developers.
• jrochkind1 6y ago
  The most interesting part to developers: they may require facebook to offer certain APIs? > The complaint also alleges that Facebook, over many years, has imposed anticompetitive conditions on third-party software developers’ access to valuable interconnections to its platform, such as the application programming interfaces (“APIs”) that allow the developers’ apps to interface with Facebook. In particular, Facebook allegedly has made key APIs available to third-party applications only on the condition that they refrain from developing competing functionalities, and from connecting with or promoting other social networking services. > The complaint alleges that Facebook has enforced these policies by cutting off API access to blunt perceived competitive threats from rival personal social networking services, mobile messaging apps, and other apps with social functionalities. For example, in 2013, Twitter launched the app Vine, which allowed users to shoot and share short video segments. In response, according to the complaint, Facebook shut down the API that would have allowed Vine to access friends via Facebook. Making API's available "only on the condition that [developers] refrain from developing competing functionalities" is one thing; and I can see how that seems anticompetitive, I dont' know enough about the law to say when anticompetitive is illegal. But that second one is more interesting. "shut down the API that would have allowed Vine to access friends via Facebook" -- they didn't just not have Vine have access to it, they removed it, and that is being complained about. The implication to me seems to be that facebook must provide certain API's to avoid anticompetitive behavior? The API I personally most miss and am interested in is Events. My interest is definitely in reducing facebook's lock on users. A lot of people I know find missing out on events the hardest reason to leave facebook, and if an API was available show Facebook events on other platforms, it would definitely aid people in leaving Facebook, which is I presume exactly why Facebook got rid of the API, which sounds pretty similar to the Vine complaint, although I don't know whether there was a specific facebook competitor threatening them with events integration. I would be thrilled if the FTC made Facebook restore an Events API, hopefully in a way that was sufficiently full-featured for the kinds of integrations that would help people get off facebook. ("Help people get off", it sounds like an addiction, yup).
  • dillondoyle 6y ago
    This to me is the only compelling argument and I personally hope the government makes this successfully. Trying to look at IG/WhatsApp acquisitions is dumb imho. But FB has consistently introduced open APIs and features, let them gain traction, then shut them down and replicated the most popular features. I have been burned multiple times. Most recently new restrictions on Messaging. If FB was mandated to restore some APIs possible make new ones for interoperability (while keeping the privacy changes over the years) that would be super super valuable to help other companies make value without trying some fruitless and probably not sound breakup.
• mrkramer 6y ago
  This doesn't make sense who authorized Instagram and Whatsapp acquisitions at the first place? FTC [1] It isn't Zuck's fault nobody else is as competitive as Facebook is.... I look at you MySpace and Twitter. [1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2012/08/ftc-closes-its-investigation-facebooks-proposed-acquisition https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2012/08/ftc-c... "The Federal Trade Commission has closed its nonpublic investigation of Facebook's proposed acquisition of Instagram, Inc., without taking any action. Accordingly, the deal may now proceed as proposed." "The Commission vote to close the investigation was 5-0."
  • sigmar 6y ago
    For perspective, the acquisition was before IG had ads and before Facebook was publicly traded. How was the FTC supposed to magically see the future anti-competitive actions (like blocking vine)?
    • mrits 6y ago
      That same perspective shows that the industry has evolved since then. If FTC can't be held accountable for not predicting the future neither can Facebook. Of course, I don't believe this at all since anyone in the industry knew exactly why Facebook would buy Instagram, especially the FTC.
      • packthetop 6y ago
        > If FTC can't be held accountable for not predicting the future neither can Facebook. Something tells me the FTC isn’t going to be amenable to “gotcha” arguments
        • pb7 6y ago
          Are we not holding the government to a higher standard than private companies now or what? The FTC's entire job is to do these types of analyses. It's unfortunate that we're so used to the government being dismally incompetent in every way.
• city17 6y ago
  I think the key is not whether they'll have to divest current platforms, but if they can acquire whatever will be the next popular platform. If Zuckerberg sells Instagram, but can still buy the next platform, he'll always maintain his monopoly.
  • akarma 6y ago
    > The FTC is seeking a permanent injunction in federal court that could, among other things: require divestitures of assets, including Instagram and WhatsApp; prohibit Facebook from imposing anticompetitive conditions on software developers; and require Facebook to seek prior notice and approval for future mergers and acquisitions. If the FTC has their way, Facebook will need to seek prior notice and approval for future mergers and acquisitions.
• newbie578 6y ago
  Wow, this is huge. I just wonder how would it even work if Instagram was forced to separate? So this means Facebook and Google were hit with lawsuits, when is Apple and Amazon next? I can even understand the Google lawsuit, but can someone explain to me how is Facebook a monopoly? I find a bigger problem Apple than Facebook. It is Google and Apple that have a death grip on the mobile market...
• smashah 6y ago
  WhatsApp can just be considered as worldwide communications infrastructure. More important than text/calls. No way should all of that be in the control of one single (also cretinous) company. Good luck on this one America. I have low expectations but high hopes.
• ummonk 6y ago
  Note that the states filed a separate suit that is slightly broader in scope: https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/facebook_complaint_12.9.2020.pdf https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/facebook_complaint_12....
• throwaway23457 6y ago
  This is the most boneheaded move from the US government ever. This will hurt the US position on the Internet. It will also cause Silicon Valley salaries to go lower. Developers are getting paid high salaries because of Google and Facebook; any moves to split these companies into smaller companies will cause the salaries to drop, as smaller companies will not be able to pay the salaries Google and Facebook pay to its employees. This will hurt the Valley.
• hugh4life 6y ago
  I fully support breaking up big tech, but there are geopolitical dimensions I'm surprised many pushing breaking up big tech don't seem to consider. It's much easier for non-US entities to selectively block and pressure smaller services.
• throwawaysea 6y ago
  Facebook feels like a punching bag to me but not the company I am most concerned about from an anti-trust perspective. I am more concerned about the amount of market influence and power wrapped up in Google (Search and Ads), Microsoft (able to freely steal ideas like Slack and turn it into Teams by leveraging O365), Amazon (amassed capital letting them compete in any segment), Apple (acquiring companies and then over-verticalizing) etc. We need a revision of anti-trust law for the modern era, to encourage competition against these giant conglomerates. I think there will be a lot of ancillary benefits from breaking up these organizations that should be welcome to all parts of the political spectrum. Distribution of market power means distribution of financial outcomes as well. It lowers barriers for others to challenge incumbents. It allows companies to decentralize from a few overly-powerful city-states. And so on.
• akarma 6y ago
  Facebook has been preparing for this for years: - cross-app communication between Messenger and Instagram - Messenger API enabling business communication on Instagram - ad management for Instagram and Facebook through a centralized platform - WhatsApp business accounts linking to Facebook accounts - Facebook shopping in-app in WhatsApp These are all small and there are many more examples, but an overarching theme is to integrate FB's products as much as possible. It's not only to increase adoption and revenue, but also to make them appear inseparable.
  • codq 6y ago
    They’d a lot of glue, but not much is inseparable. Messenger tying to Instagram, for example, was entirely tactical. A dozen people might miss that feature.
  • alliao 6y ago
    same business case as Internet Explorer being inseparable part of Windows 95 Kernel thus they HAD to be bundled together... I'm sure stuff like these sounded fine in decision maker heads...
• ghufran_syed 6y ago
  I feel like instead of pushing for the companies to separate, congress should pass laws mandating [adversarial interoperability](https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...). Then the data (including the social graph) really would belong to the users, and facebook would have to compete with multiple other “social network clients” that would rapidly emerge. Facebook would lose some monopoly profits, but in the long-run they might even make more money - they have a lot of very smart practical engineers (at least based on seeing their approach to writing libraries e.g. react vs angular, pytorch vs tensorflow etc.) So if forced to compete, I think they would do just fine, particularly because I believe that the ecosystem would develop faster in the presence of real, and actually grow the market beyond what it would otherwise be.
  • bzb6 6y ago
    No thanks, I don’t want to spend all day receiving spam via WhatsApp like in the days of irc.
    • Triv888 6y ago
      IRC spam?
  • theanarcrist 6y ago
    I agree and find the attempt at a breakup a bit frustrating. This is an action that could have profoundly disruptive effect and it's not really clear what the positives or negatives would be. For instance, FB has invested massively in trust and safety people operations and AI. What happens to that investment when IG is spun off? Laying out laws and regulations so the market works as intended (no doubt with adjustments on the way) seems like the far preferable way to ensure healthy competition than taking a hammer to the job site and hoping for the best.
    • natex 6y ago
      > Laying out laws and regulations so the market works as intended (no doubt with adjustments on the way) seems like the far preferable way to ensure healthy competition... That's what antitrust/monopoly laws do.
• jsperson 6y ago
  As a thought experiment, imagine what the actual remedy is. An interesting concept would be to break up Facebook using AT&T as a metaphor. Make Facebook open up it's API to allow other applications to connect much like the baby bells could connect to the central network and eventually there were separate interconnected networks. So the FB feed exists, but multiple apps can post. Each app consumes the feed and sells advertising to their own platform with FB charging a reasonable fixed interconnect fee.
  • paxys 6y ago
    > Make Facebook open up it's API to allow other applications to connect much like the baby bells could connect to the central network and eventually there were separate interconnected networks. The Facebook API is already pretty open. That's how we got Cambridge Analytica.
• robalni 6y ago
  Is it enough to have competing social networks to Facebook? What's the point of competition, isn't it that if one product is bad, someone can make a better one so that people can use that one instead? If I think Facebook is bad, can I use another product to communicate with people on Facebook? The problem is that the network is the product. If we want real competition we need to make sure that competing products can exist within the network. Look at how email works. That's the only way we can have real competition.
• greesil 6y ago
  Wasn't each of these acquisitions allowed by the FTC?
• crazygringo 6y ago
  Honestly, while I have my doubts about this succeeding, it nevertheless feels like the big tech suit most likely to succeed. Amazon promoting its own brands isn't much different from a supermarket offering its own brand items. Apple isn't a monopoly in phones because of Android. And Google's search is so inherently tied to selling ads as a business model that separating them is a difficult argument -- plus search competitors are just a click away, as evidenced by how much Google pays Apple to be the default. But FB, IG and WhatsApp are clearly separate products, all very much monopolies in their markets, easy to split up without huge adverse effects, and FB purchasing them was clearly done to neuter potential competitive threats. So if any suit is going to succeed, this feels like it would be the one.
  • pwillia7 6y ago
    As I learned at my first company when we were sued for (bogus) anti trust reasons -- You do not need to actually be a monopoly to run afoul of anti trust laws. You only need the speak and act with the intent to do so. Using your market share to harm your competitors without a clear benefit to customers is enough to get you even if there are other large companies in the space.
  • madeofpalk 6y ago
    > Amazon promoting its own brands isn't much different from a supermarket offering its own brand items. The huge difference here is that when you go into Walmart you don't announce to the company what you want to buy.
    • a_crc 6y ago
      Is it really that big of a difference? You still have to go to the one section of walmart where they stock the cheese or car batteries or whatever. Walmart can set up their own shelves to emphasize their own brands if they want. If you pay with a credit card at walmart they can collect the same data about your purchase history as amazon would as well.
      • gamblor956 6y ago
• butler14 6y ago
  I'm all for this but... Google, anyone?
• tobyhede 6y ago
  In all of these threads on Apple, Google, Facebook and friends, its fascinating that the overall tone and position of technologists has changed over time from radical cyberpunk freedom to "monopolies aren't that bad really".
  • darkwizard42 6y ago
    Because these aren't monopolies... People are still advocating for radical freedom but can also happily support products and companies where users benefit
  • tomtheelder 6y ago
    It's absolutely wild and hugely depressing to me that the prevailing tone favors the mega-corporations. The current over-consolidation is a disaster in every industry, and tech is no exception. Nearly every one of these organizations has proven to be a bad faith actor who cannot be effectively regulated. It's time to actually do something about it.
• balozi 6y ago
  It will be interesting to see what the new administration will do with this. The way I see it, this type of charge creates more headache and landmines for the incoming administration than it does for Facebook.
• fuzxi 6y ago
  Anyone who follows these kinds of suits: does this have teeth? What outcomes are we most likely to see as a result of this?
  • AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    Yes, it has teeth - for some values of "teeth". Yes, the FTC wins lawsuits like this. Not always, but some of the time. And if they win, they can in fact ask for Facebook to be broken up, and get it. And even if they don't win, Facebook has to take it seriously, which takes time and energy from executives. They have to at least consider the chance that the FTC will win, which means that they might think about a settlement rather than rolling the dice on a trial. How much that settlement changes things depends on how the sides negotiate, which depends (at least in part) on how much confidence each side has that they would win. Does this suit have enough merit to succeed? I have no idea.
• dalbasal 6y ago
  The problem with these recent FAANG antitrust cases is that action is pretty narrow. Google lost its Adwords case in the EU: using data gathered via the adwords advertising monopoly to support its search monopoly. $1.5bn fine. Google will happily pay this for anything that meaningfully strengthens their position in this market. Besides the fine, all they have to do is stop doing the specific, narrow "monopolistic behaviour" that prosecutors were able to prove. This just isn't how monopoly works, and modifying some specific behaviour doesn't affect much. Whack-a-mole is almost pointless. Antitrust is about structure, inherently. If antitrust action doesn't lead to structural changes, I don't see any point in it. Similar cases will likely be prosecuted against Amazon (and google) in multiple jurisdictions with the adwords case serving as a (very narrow) template for prosecuting data/marketplace monopolism. Hence amazon. We can probably expect a similar result. A cost-of-doing-business fine and some updated policies about sharing data between the marketplace and retail arms. If prosecutors prove both a monopoly position and monopolistic abuses (it did, and will), this needs to be deemed proof of a broad problem. Other monopolistic abuses need to be assumed. The fix needs to address the problems, known and unknown broadly. For example, by separating the marketplace and participant (adwords & search; amazon marketplace & retail) into seperate businesses. In this FB case, it's about buying all the competition: whatsapp, instagram, etc. A fine or a policy update don't fix this. Force a sale of these companies. Ban FB from acquiring companies entirely, or social media companies at least. Ultimately, the regulator has already failed here. Those acquisitions should not have been allowed in the first place. Antitrust isn't about punishing bad behaviour. It's about dealing with bad structures. That said, it does feel like antitrust cops are working up to it, gradually.
• jonathanehrlich 6y ago
  From what i understand, the FTC reviewed the Instagram acquisition twice before giving their blessing. I wish we all had this kind of power to remake decisions depending on how they turn out. Would be pretty awesome.
• steve_taylor 6y ago
  This smells political, possibly retribution for crimes such as fact checking. It’s without merit. The complaint states that Facebook should have competed with Instagram and WhatsApp instead of acquiring them. But if it did so successfully, it would be likely to run afoul of antitrust law anyway. And since when is a company under any obligation to provide its customer list to up and coming competitors? That’s ludicrous. It’s interesting watching all the ways America tears itself apart.
  • thraway12 6y ago
    https://twitter.com/BadLegalTakes https://twitter.com/BadLegalTakes
• ryeguy_24 6y ago
  Can someone help me understand why the acquisitions here are considered anticompetitive? I get it, if I buy the competition, then I'm reducing my competition. If I'm a car wash and I buy another car wash across the street, arguably our services overlap 100%. But maybe the acquired carwash was $4 more expensive and served a more luxury clientele. Is that a competitor or not a competitor or both? How can you also ever prove that a company being acquired was truly a competitor? What percentage overlap on products and services would be necessary to deem that company a competitor? My bet is that there is a lack of science here and surplus of qualitative judgment. Educate me please... :)
  • bun_at_work 6y ago
    I can't speak on how you can measure overlap, but after reading the FTC summary linked, it seems like the acquisitions are considered anticompetitive because Facebook recognized both Instagram and Whatsapp as potential threats to their primary product - Facebook - and sought to acquire them to neutralize that competitive threat. Just to add - they also say the lawsuit is focusing not just on anticompetitive acquisitions, but anticompetitive practices related to developer access to APIs. Apparently Facebook has been heavy-handed towards developers that sought to use their APIs for any product that might have overlapped with their products. An example is Vine - Vine was apparently blocked from using the Facebook API to share videos or something.
• deleted 6y ago
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• spoonjim 6y ago
  Is this one of the things they're trying to get in before the next Presidential administration? Is the consensus that Biden wouldn't go after Facebook as hard? I thought that both sides of the political spectrum loathed Facebook roughly equally.
• polote 6y ago
  When the same thing is going to happen to the Match group (Tinder, Okc, hinge, match,...)? In their case this is 100% obvious that they buy any new dating app in order to keep their monopoly and the result is clearly bad for the users
  • root_axis 6y ago
    It's lacking a political angle.
  • tomtheelder 6y ago
    We need a really big ticket trust-bust to begin a new era of de-consolidation. Breaking up Match just isn't exciting enough right now.
• silentsea90 6y ago
  Not sure if I am the only one feeling this way, but I hope for the death of facebook (at least in its current form). I feel they are a net negative for society and have done enough shady things to deserve that tag. Disinformation, election hacking, free basics (aka attempted non net neutral free internet in India) marketing it as a service to humanity. Zuck is undeniably smart but has failed time and time again to make the moral right decisions, right from the start of facebook.
  • antiterra 6y ago
    Giving people free access to wikipedia is so evil that XKCD made a comic about it: https://xkcd.com/548/ https://xkcd.com/548/
  • jariel 6y ago
    1) FB is not negative for society. It's just a social network. Most people use it because they like it. 2) It's not good when governments swoop in and shut down / mess around with private business in general. Of all the things the Feds could be doing, putting in privacy protections, Net Neutrality, protecting from scams would be much higher on this list.
    • tomtheelder 6y ago
      Both of these statements are highly contentious, and I strongly disagree with both of them in this case. Everything that follows is my opinion, as these are clearly questions without objective answers. Facebook has become a massive force for division and the propagation of hate rhetoric. A lot of that comes from their own algorithms which basically create a catered stream of content to reinforce user's already held beliefs. This is not a FB specific issue, but they are probably the largest offender. I would argue they have been an absolutely massive negative for society. I a vacuum you'd want private business left alone, but corporate power in America has reached absurd levels, and we desperately need the government to step in and do something. Long gone is the point at which labor organization could function as a counterweight to corporate power (in no small part because of the government going after it, but it doesn't really matter why). The insane consolidation of the economy has been a huge driving force for wage deflation, stagnation of productivity, and wealth inequality.
• Siira 6y ago
  I don’t think Facebook is at fault for being smart and buying promising fledgling companies. What is needed is to make the big networks interoperable, probably by offering an API like Telegram does. The API could be priced according to usage, starting for free for small companies.
• alliao 6y ago
  split it between social and advertising and setup a transparent market to buy and sell personal data then let the market decide.
• yurlungur 6y ago
  Despite the myriad of caveats I still like these attempts to rein in big tech, probably against my own interest as well. Well, let's see how it pans out.
• actuator 6y ago
  I will be really surprised if this succeeds. FB can just point to Tiktok and show that an upstart can succeed as there is nothing tying someone to FB properties just by virtue of them being together.
• resila11 6y ago
  I think there is a lack of imagination here. Perhaps a "social graph" shouldn't belong to any company. The concept itself might be anti-privacy. Perhaps it's time to move back to simpler things like OPML. (Which people seem more comfortable sharing freely - not sure if that's still a "social graph" tho.) Perhaps specific relationship details shouldn't be housed in the social network - just the permission to follow. Perhaps companies who house a "social graph" should be regulated - similar to what is done with medical data. It should be a toxic substance. I just think we're a long way from doing this right and there are a lot of untried options - and I lack imagination as well. http://helicraft.ca/kxt/aud-v-chi-cl1.html http://helicraft.ca/kxt/aud-v-chi-cl1.html http://helicraft.ca/kxt/aud-v-chi-cl2.html http://helicraft.ca/kxt/aud-v-chi-cl2.html
• rohittidke 6y ago
  Facebook is one of the best companies in the tech world. They open source so much tech and pre-trained ml models. Even being smaller than MS and Amazon their contributions are huge. (i don't know what AWS contributes)
• nashashmi 6y ago
  Without A think tank for how fb should be split, this suit won’t succeed in court for no reason other than impracticality. Without sustaining rules there is nothing stopping another fb from coming in the future. Without rules and without a master roadmap, I can’t see the judge agreeing to this. Like sun tzu said the battle is won before the first shot is fired. And this is a losing battle. Here is what I think of an ideal future. Platforms need to be separated and service providers need to be separated. They can be one company but separate management with no influence between each other. Messaging platforms can be separate with interoperability. As long as management is separate. Facebook properties are a combination of friend network, share portal, news aggregator portal, ad display, ad filter, messaging platforms, data analyzers. And more than I care to know. This is too much power under one management. By splitting platforms from service providers seeking customers on those platforms, and allowing customers to disconnect from those platforms and move to other platforms, a large fracking sound will be heard.
• AntiImperialist 6y ago
  So, out of all these big tech companies, Facebook is the monopoly? Not Google with search? Not Apple with their App Store? Facebook, a company whose products you could completely ignore and not even notice you're missing anything?
• deleted 6y ago
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• RobRivera 6y ago
  If it is illegal...shouldnt the AG prosecute them??
• martin_drapeau 6y ago
  I can't help but step back and look at the trade wars between the US and China. China is gaining ground fast. US on the otherhand is turning to infighting by suing FB, Google and Amazon. Countries win through innovation. It's hard to innovate with such distractions. China must be happy cheering on its tech companies while the US is on the sidelines. Go figure...
  • SCUSKU 6y ago
    Arguably by breaking up big tech companies, there will be more space for innovation, especially for startups.
    • andromeduck 6y ago
      or we could just make it much easier for people to break off and start their own business
      • SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
        The problem is if you try to monetize it, facebook or google will overnight release a 10x better version for free.
        • andromeduck 6y ago
          if you water down restrictions like noncompetes it won't matter, the people at fb or goog would just as likely start their own
          • SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
            The people at google or facebook don't poses some secret talent that the rest of us do not. Most senior developers could have built what facebook and google release given enough time and money. The problem is that you simply can not keep up with 100 developers working full time building the same product as you but giving it out for free.
• plandis 6y ago
  I'm kind of confused by this. When Facebook acquired WhatsApp didn't it have to get government approval? For example here [1] is an article from Reuters. It seems like "corporate entrapment" to approve a deal and then later sue the company for going through with the deal that you approved. For what it's worth, I'm not fan of Facebook (I'm not employed, don't directly own their stock, and in general do use Facebook products) but this seems kind of absurd to me. [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-whatsapp/facebook-says-whatsapp-deal-cleared-by-ftc-idUSBREA391VA20140410 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-facebook-whatsapp/faceboo...
• yeswecatan 6y ago
  Please excuse my ignorance, but doesn't the FTC (or is it the SEC?) have to approve acquisitions? If so, why were the acquisitions approved in the first place?
• emodendroket 6y ago
  I don't really feel like everyone's concerns are resolved by creating more unaccountable entities that all have everyone's data
• fullshark 6y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817850 > Can someone please tell me how Instagram's actual content is worth anything? We're talking about photo-filtered cell phone camera shots here. Facebook doesn't need a user acquisition ploy. I guess maybe it's a move to keep users in Facebook, but I'd be willing to bet a million bucks that almost everyone is discovering Instagram content via Facebook or Twitter. Seems like mostly a huge waste of cash.
  • mike00632 6y ago
    Funny. I'm not on Twitter and only discover Twitter content through Facebook.
• julienb_sea 6y ago
  The monopoly argument feels questionable. FB's acquisition of Instagram and Whatsapp has certainly solidified their long term standing. There is so much behavior crossover between the three that at some level it's become just a branding exercise. Whatsapp is entirely replaceable by FB messenger, many instagram features are directly implemented in FB and vice versa. These are all serving slightly different parts of the market, but the market has TONS of social networks that are entirely outside of FB control. TikTok, Reddit, Twitter, even an ecosystem like google accounts or apple accounts, these all are large competitors to different aspects of what FB offers.
• hindsightbias 6y ago
  Zuck is going to be richer than John D. Rockefeller when Standard Oil was broken up.
• RedComet 6y ago
  About time.
• mmaunder 6y ago
  This will result in a huge “fine”, a multi-billion dollar notch on FTC belts, and no change.
  • thraway12 6y ago
    https://twitter.com/BadLegalTakes https://twitter.com/BadLegalTakes
• musicale 6y ago
  I'm sure the FTC will have great success breaking up Facebook, just as they did breaking up Microsoft and IBM. It obviously worked because neither Microsoft nor IBM is dominant in mobile computing.
• mrleinad 6y ago
  Just curious, as I don't live in the states and haven't done the research: Didn't they need an approval for acquiring Instagram and WhatsApp? If so, did no one say at the time "hey, this might become a monopoly".
• khazhoux 6y ago
  I fail to see what the public benefit would be of breaking out Instagram and WhatsApp, or exposing the APIs more widely. * Are customers lives improved by browsing lifestyle photos on Instagram^notFB ? * WhatsApp makes voice and video calls. How does it affect me that it's part of FB? How is my life improved if its not? Another voice/video app will somehow thrive? * Opening their APIs so that a couple of startups can build custom FB and Instagram apps? One of them will succeed and the rest will fail. This is the public benefit? There's such a huge difference between this and Microsoft's anti-competitive case: Microsoft controlled your entire computer. When they restricted apps, they restricted your entire ability to operate your computer, connect to the internet, etc. Here, FB is constraining... your access to social data on FB??
  • eitland 6y ago
    > WhatsApp makes voice and video calls. How does it affect me that it's part of FB? How is my life improved if its not? Another voice/video app will somehow thrive? WhatsApp used to have strong guarantees against tracking (and ads) as long as they were independent. They were wildly profitable and was my favorite messaging service until Facebook bought them. Now I reluctantly use Telegram, but I'd much rather have something like WhatsApp back were I can pay real money for the service instead of paying with my metadata.
• bewaretheirs 6y ago
  An odd symmetry of sorts in the list of states participating: Both North Carolina and North Dakota are participating in the suit. Neither South Carolina nor South Dakota are participating. (The other two holdouts are Georgia and Alabama).
• dang 6y ago
  There are multiple pages of comments, accessible via the 'More' link at the bottom of the page, or click here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25363366&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25363366&p=2 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25363366&p=3 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25363366&p=3 (This message will eventually self-destruct.)
  • dang 6y ago
    This is a stub comment to hold all the replies to the parent. I did not mean to explode an offtopicness charge, and usually turn off replies for these because the same issue comes up every time and the answer is always the same. (When it comes to explaining something, the internet is stateless [1].) Forgot to do so in this case! I'll move them now. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20stateless&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
    • aerosmile 6y ago
      I get it that HN is all about minimal design, but the need for the parent post (in this and other threads) is a sign that the UI could be improved in this aspect.
      • pvg 6y ago
        This stuff is for performance reasons: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20paginat&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
      • jxramos 6y ago
        Maybe for pagination purposes the multiple pages could be enumerated right after the opening header and we could spot right away the prolific set of comments a given post has attracted. That would make things pretty discoverable right off the bat.
        • 6y ago
• strin 6y ago
  I wonder if the world would converge to an open standard for social networks: https://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/march/privacy-economy-app-031014.html https://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/march/privacy-economy-ap...
• MutantSputnik 6y ago
  It's retaliation for not handing Trump the election like in '16
• Trias11 6y ago
  Short version: "Give us $500M and it will go away"
• thraway12 6y ago
  Can't wait for everyone to say the way it should work without any political analysis about what CAN happen. Someone's going to do something about tech. This is the thing they're doing. That's how law has worked since the founding. No one waits for a perfect law to enforce. We enforce, especially when there are major social ills. The actual solution is that tech needs to gets its sociopath issue under control. It won't. So it gets the hose.
• thraway12 6y ago
  This entire thread belongs on https://twitter.com/BadLegalTakes https://twitter.com/BadLegalTakes
  • lovecg 6y ago
    Do enlighten us. Is there a point by point debunking summarized somewhere?
• spoonjim 6y ago
  I strongly believe that this is a result of Mark Zuckerberg just being strongly disliked, for reasons that seem entirely focused on his person ("Zuckerbot") and not his company's actions. I think the reason you see this coming down on Facebook and not Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc. is just this intense anti-charisma that he has.
• ii550 6y ago
  What about treating them as a monopoly? And giving them the laws of a monopoly? Like suggested here: https://hbr.org/2019/05/dont-break-up-facebook-treat-it-like-a-utility https://hbr.org/2019/05/dont-break-up-facebook-treat-it-like...
• smokey_circles 6y ago
  I don't see this as being a solvable problem. Having a psychographic model is dangerous to social structures, it just makes it far too easy to manipulate those who are easy to manipulate (which, given any topic, is the vast majority of people). There are no effective defenses against this that I can see. The trouble is the disconnect between Facebook's apparent business model and what it actually is, although I'll admit this might be conflating who is the real bad guy here. The business of advertising is behavior manipulation, pure and simple. Nothing about that strikes me as "safe"
• richardARPANET 6y ago
  Now do Google.
• jrochkind1 6y ago
  Is it weird that the FTC can sue for acquisitions that the FTC approved at the time?
• ajharrison 6y ago
  Frivolous lawsuit. Capitalism doesn’t stop working if it doesn’t work for you.
• deadmik3 6y ago
  Someone needs to tell the FTC that if they don't like how Facebook does its business, they're free to just start their own Facebook
• rogerdickey 6y ago
  Moral of the story - don’t be unpopular
• rolph 6y ago
  facebook is a 4th generation warfare munition. FB is cultivating a body of heuristics for the manipulation of reaction prone individuals, and astroturfing to entrench ideals and predictable reactions to shocks or stressors. simply put doxing and gaslighting to create an advantage that is beyond antitrust, and in the realm of world threatening. for your convienience: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niccol%C3%B2_Machiavelli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niccol%C3%B2_Machiavelli https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prince https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prince
• CountSessine 6y ago
  PLEASE, please, please, please, pretty-please force them to sell Oculus too. F*ck facebook for ruining a product like this by gating it with Facebook membership.
• twirlock 6y ago
  >Alphabet spooks use their puppet to squash a competitor Great priority, FTC. Be sure to also do absolutely nothing about marketers astroturfing and selling our dox.