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I laughed at this because I thought the same thing. Conspiratorial or no, that line of argument won't fly. Saying everything is so integrated that it can't po
by abernard1 6y ago
I laughed at this because I thought the same thing.
Conspiratorial or no, that line of argument won't fly. Saying everything is so integrated that it can't possibly be decentralized is basically proof of monopoly.
- the-dude 6y agoIIRC this is exactly what MS claimed about bundling IE : it was tied into the kernel.
- breckenedge 6y agoYes that was a defense. Explorer.exe and IE were intimately tied together. Remember “active desktop”? You could make your Windows desktop background a web page. Crazy times...
- Steltek 6y agoI wouldn't mind that, actually. I could create my own dashboard/background.
- not_knuth 6y agoWell as always, that can easily be done on Linux. There is even a widget on KDE that lets you do precisely that.
- wongarsu 6y agoWith Wallpaper Engine or similar programs you can still do it. It's no longer a Windows feature, but they have enough API surface to make it possible for other software to implement.
- Throwaway1771 6y agoThis can still be done.
- hnlmorg 6y agoBare in mind back then was before "Web 2.0", there wasn't AJAX, responsive web design and any of the other technologies we now take for granted. And to add to the woes, most computers still weren't powerful enough to handle running Active Desktop. It was a huge resource drain. Some of the other desktop integration features of Internet Explorer 4 were pretty nice though. These days most desktop environments allow for desktop widgets and usually there's a web view widget amongst them. So you can still have your web desktop if you wanted. At least now computers are powerful enough, and the frontend tools are useful enough, that there is some arguable benefit.
- Grazester 6y agoAnd I loved it!
- jaimex2 6y agoTo be fair IE crashing would take out the whole OS.
- jonplackett 6y agoBack then anything crashing usually took down the whole OS
- anoncake 6y agoDidn't MS still argue they couldn't unbundle IE in the XP days?
- EE84M3i 6y agoI don't think MS said it was bundled in the kernel, but it is true that parts of IE are tied into the OS (or at least used to be) in the form of mshtml and jscript.
- josefx 6y agoBasic functionality like windows update was implemented using websites and activex components. You couldn't run that with any other browser.
- anoncake 6y agoActually you could, as long as that browser used the Trident engine. Microsoft could have easily shipped a dedicated update application that's just a simple "browser" locked to the windows update website.
- gsich 6y agoIt's a lame excuse anyway. They could have just hidden the IE symbol, deactivating auto-open with IE and it would have been fine.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- hn_throwaway_99 6y ago> Saying everything is so integrated that it can't possibly be decentralized is basically proof of monopoly. That doesn't make any sense to me. I would expect different applications from the same company to share the same underlying infrastructure. Whether or not they are a monopoly is orthogonal to the issue of integration.
- abernard1 6y ago> Whether or not they are a monopoly is orthogonal to the issue of integration. So, I get you here and what you're saying. But companies at this scale argue they're "independently managed" or whatever. With that context, for Facebook, there's really no way of saying that these 3 different brands are independent when it comes down to it. It'd be much like Procter & Gamble saying their 100s of brands were all really different institutional entities.
- Spivak 6y agoAt the far end of this reasoning three separate companies that all use AWS share the same underlying infrastructure and all go down when AWS does. It doesn't mean they're not independently managed.
- abernard1 6y agoBut there aren't 3 different Amazon marketplaces--owned by Amazon--built on that infra. And AWS is available standalone. Here we have core infrastructure that isn't sold to anyone else and powering 3 supposedly different social messaging services. The key isn't the backend, it's the supposed independence of the frontends.
- human 6y agoAnd the same could be said for the electrical grid, the post services, roads, etc. I agree that infrastructure and monopoly are two very distict concepts.
- baby 6y agoNo, it’s relatively easy to go from one cloud platform to the other (thanks god for terraform). To go out of fb infra? I can’t even imagine.
- mmmmmbop 6y agoIt would also be a hilarious argument to make after previously convincing the European Commission in 2014 that there is no technical way to integrate Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp user accounts. [0] [0] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/pl/IP_17_1369 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/pl/IP_17_...
- read_if_gay_ 6y ago> convincing the European Commission in 2014 that there is no technical way to integrate Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp user accounts. What was the argument there? It's not like that's solving the halting problem.
- enos_feedler 6y agoI think “technical” here just means something like: one uses phone numbers and the other uses emails. The current technical solution doesn’t make it straightforward to merge. Evolving the technical solution would require product and user facing changes. And probably a lot of edge cases
- 8note 6y agoThat sounds like a tech interview question
- sidr 6y agoI am not sure why a shared messaging infrastructure implies merging accounts is easy/possible. It's fully possible to have messages pass on a common infrastructure between different entities that correspond to messenger/whatsapp accounts. I'm not saying I necessarily believe facebook here, but I don't understand how they are contradicting themselves here.
- mrits 6y agoI think the arguments will be - FTC Approved these as as legitimate acquisitions - Facebook has direct competitors that can overtake them in just a few years - Instagram was made by a few python coders in months. This shows how easy it is to make a product that competes with Facebook
- sharker8 6y agoParts of IG in the early days involved filters on iOS, which at the time there was no library for. My understanding. The web version was Django, yes.
- mrits 6y agoBy web version I'm guessing you mean server side? Server side was a few python components with lots of tricks in Postgres for scaling purposes. You didn't have any real choices for what language you used in iOS
- sharker8 6y agoYes, that's what I meant. The point I was trying to make was that just knowing server side scripting was a necessary but not sufficient condition to create a hit photo sharing app at that time, because there weren't many options on the camera at the time, and the filters were what drove the growth at that time.
- mikem170 6y ago> Facebook has direct competitors that can overtake them in just a few years >Instagram was made by a few python coders in months. This shows how easy it is to make a product that competes with Facebook Then why did Facebook buy Instagram, instead whipping up some python code on their own if it's so easy? I would conclude they bought them to be anti-competitive.
- mrits 6y agoFor their users.
- dcolkitt 6y ago> Saying everything is so integrated that it can't possibly be decentralized is basically proof of monopoly. This doesn't matter from the standard of antitrust law. What most fail to grasp is that being a monopoly is not illegal. It's only illegal to use monopoly power to harm consumer welfare. In this case integration between services is a pretty strong defense against this. Facebook can argue that consolidating the infrastructure allows them to deliver each product at a lower cost and/or higher quality than if it was served independently. If the court accepted those facts, then Facebook would have a ironclad argument against being broken up under the consumer welfare standard.
- vageli 6y ago> > Saying everything is so integrated that it can't possibly be decentralized is basically proof of monopoly. > This doesn't matter from the standard of antitrust law. What most fail to grasp is that being a monopoly is not illegal. It's only illegal to use monopoly power to harm consumer welfare. Citation needed? I thought, in the US at least, that the government will go after you if you use your monopoly powers to enter into other markets. For instance Google surfacing its own, other products as the top results in search.
- csharptwdec19 6y agoIt depends on how the Justice department feels, to some extent. GM in the 50s and 60s actually kept an eye on their market share, and sometimes would kill/cutback projects or products that may have threatened going over a certain percentage (around 60%, IIRC.) At that time merely going over that number would have been enough to start an investigation. Some would argue though that back then DOJ 'cared' more.
- dcolkitt 6y agoJurisprudence also changed on the topic since then. In particular, Robert Bork published the legal theory of consumer welfare in 1978. SCOTUS essentially adapted that wholesale into case law starting with Reiter v. Sototone. Given the current makeup of the court, it seems extremely unlikely that the justices would overturn this precedent.
- DSingularity 6y agoWhat? How is that proof for a monopoly. Doubt things are that integrated but if they were then it would be proof of incompetence.
- at-fates-hands 6y agoAgreed. FYI that's exactly what they did when they broke up Ma Bell into the 7 RBOC's. Same company, same massive infrastructure. They owned everything and the government was still able to break them up.