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If you think about Facebook the consumer platform, it has a high market share, but there are a lot of competitors in the space. Social content site competitors

If you think about Facebook the consumer platform, it has a high market share, but there are a lot of competitors in the space. Social content site competitors include TikTok, YouTube, and Reddit. Messaging app competitors include iMessage and even SMS. Facebook the business (selling ads) is a large business but the largest advertiser is Google, so they aren't even the leader.

TheAdamAndChe 5y ago
Thinking of Facebook merely as a consumer platform seems overly broad to me. Each of those are social networks, but they fill a particular niche in the social experience. YouTube is for asynchronous videos from people you generally don't directly know, Reddit is for pseudoanonymous communities, etc. Facebook's niche is in one-to-many communication with people you directly know. It's also arguably one of the stickiest forms of social network because of the strength of its network effects. There is very little real competition in that niche.
- dageshi 5y ago
  If you keep narrowing the focus down, every product becomes a monopoly on its functionality?
- crazygringo 5y ago
  Finding niches is how competition happens. Another term for it is market differentiation. Even if two products/companies start out identically, they quickly diverge somewhat. Pepsi doesn't copy Coca-Cola's marketing about being a sexy/mainstream drink, they create their own niche of being for younger independent personalities. When people choose to get their viral news from Reddit rather than Facebook, or their viral videos from YouTube rather than Facebook, that's competition period.
  - TheAdamAndChe 5y ago
    The difference between Coke and Pepsi is marketing and flavor, but they directly compete in the same market. The products they have are virtually the same, only minor differences. The product differences between, say, Facebook and YouTube are night and day. You wouldn't add an acquaintance on YouTube and start messaging them through that platform. I'm not sure you can even message people like that on it anymore. But you can on Facebook. They're fundamentally different products, they only align because they both have some sort of social aspect to them. Kind of.
    - crazygringo 5y ago
      I'd look at it a different way: "Facebook" and "YouTube" aren't single products, but rather each one is a collection of something like 10-20 products that live on a single platform. For "viral videos", Facebook and YouTube (and Reddit) absolutely directly compete in the same market. For "educational videos", YouTube competes with other platforms. While for "tracking social acquaintances" Facebook competes with the Contacts apps by Apple and Google, as well as other messaging apps. Really there's no such product category as a "Facebook" or a "YouTube". And Facebook's original product category -- to keep track of social contacts and post public and private social messages -- is now only a tiny part of Facebook.
    - jjk166 5y ago
      Facebook and YouTube are both in the market for users to show advertising to, and generally every minute spent on one is a minute explicitly not spent on the other. If facebook were selling communication with friends, then YouTube would not be a competitor, but that's not Facebook's business, nor would anyone argue that Facebook has a monopoly on talking to your friends.
    - kube-system 5y ago
      This is a matter of perspective. Being intimately familiar with the differences between YouTube and Facebook, you can point out many differences. I'm sure if you were a food scientist or food marketing exec you could point out many difference between different soft drinks. These differences are market differentiators, not evidence of being in an entirely different market. Outside of the tech sphere, people see social media as a monolith in the same way that you see the soft drink industry.
  - mr_toad 5y ago
    > Another term for it is market differentiation. Companies differentiate products to avoid competition. It’s marketing 101.
    - crazygringo 5y ago
      But... they're still competing. You don't think ballpoint pens and gel pens compete with each other? Just because the consumer gets more choice doesn't mean they're not competing.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  You can define any company as a monopoly if you dig deep down enough through market segments and features.
  - cycomanic 5y ago
    That argument goes the other way as well, you can construct every company as being not a monopoly by painting the market segment broad enough. I don't think this is a valid argument.
    - MattGaiser 5y ago
      At least in the cases of Standard Oil and Bell, you would have needed to define the markets as energy and communication (including the post office) for them to not have had near total control. You could state the generalized product they sold and their total control was evident.
      - nightpool 5y ago
        How is "communication" not potentially as broad as "Social media platform"? Basically every form of digital communication falls under the banner of social media platform these days. (The GP comment cites Reddit, YouTube and SMS—as diverse a set of websites from Facebook (while still being communication-focused) as I could imagine)
    - huitzitziltzin 5y ago
      It is exactly a valid argument. The points you and the parent comment are making are the very heart of the issue in horizontal merger and monopolization cases: what is the relevant market? Draw it narrowly (I.e., convince the judge to accept a narrow market definition) and making the case against a merger or in favor of monopolization becomes easy. Convince the judge to draw it broadly and it becomes much harder to stop a merger or to make a monopolization claim.
      - cycomanic 5y ago
- nindalf 5y ago
  Hacker News is a monopoly in the social-news-aggregator-with-a-tech-focus-along-with-other-interesting-content-and-strong-moderation-space. dang better watch out for the FTC.
  - scotuswroteus 5y ago
    -and-an-emphasis-on-downvoting-me
ethbr0 5y ago
Facebook the ad business is the monopoly. What really needs to happen is to amend monopoly definitions in cases where a captive market is present. The issue with Facebook isn't that they own 100% of the ad market, but that they control 100% of the Facebook ad market, which is itself large enough to constitute monopoly concerns. (As with Apple and Google app stores) Advertising is trickier than apps in terms of separation, but my gut says things would be better if companies with large captive market share were required to wholesale ad space and targeting via standardized mechanisms. And were specifically prohibited from developing any kind of value add ad products on top of their platforms. Just too much conflict of interest.
- JumpCrisscross 5y ago
  > isn't that they own 100% of the ad market, but that they control 100% of the Facebook ad market You need to define these terms in a way that doesn't make everything a monopoly. Because by this logic, my corner flower vendor has a monopoly on her corner and also on the flowers she is holding in her hand right now.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    Submarkets over a certain size, controlled by a single party
    - twoodfin 5y ago
      Like the “submarket” of Costco & Costco’s shelves?
    - MattGaiser 5y ago
      The submarket of Walmart shelves? This would basically ban any business that sells goods/services from going beyond a certain size.
      - dmoy 5y ago
        A fair point, because Walmart, Target, CVS, Costco, etc all vertically integrate and sell their own (often whitelabeled) products on their shelves, alongside other companies' goods.
Retric 5y ago
Saying Facebook and YouTube are direct completion seems like a huge stretch. Google made G+ specifically because as Far as Google was concerned it lacked a direct Facebook competitor. In what way can consumers substitute normal use like sharing photos with family members on Facebook with YouTube?
- kube-system 5y ago
  As a literal answer to your question, here's how to post photos on YouTube: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7124474 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7124474 But if I understand correctly, determining whether two companies are competitors is more about their markets, rather than their feature sets. From the ruling text: > Although the precise definition of a “Personal Social Networking Service” is disputed (as that is the market in which Facebook has its alleged monopoly), it can be summarized here as one that enables users to virtually connect with others in their network and to digitally share their views and experiences by posting about them in a shared, virtual social space. YouTube would fit that definition.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - Retric 5y ago
    That’s not even vaguely the same thing. Still if in your opinion YouTube was a “Personal Social Networking Service” then why do you think Google have made G+?
    - kube-system 5y ago
      It's not my opinion, it's what the court said in plaintext. YouTube undeniably: "enables users to virtually connect with others in their network and to digitally share their views and experiences by posting about them in a shared, virtual social space." Competing on features != competing in a different market. Feature sets and markets are two very different things. What definition would you use to define Facebook's market?
twobitshifter 5y ago
Hypothetically, Facebook has a monopoly in social networking, but then they decide to launch a roblox clone tomorrow. Since they have a new product line where they don’t have a monopoly, we should look the other way? It’s true that Facebook exists in many spaces where they are not dominant but that does not diminish their dominance - in fact it’s their platform dominance that makes them so dangerous to smaller companies in other spaces.
- graeme 5y ago
  You’re commenting on a thread about reality, not a hypothetical, where the judge specifically called out reasoning such as yours that argues Facebook is a monopolist without defining terms or making concrete market share arguments.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  > but that does not diminish their dominance - in fact it’s their platform dominance that makes them so dangerous to smaller companies in other spaces. You have to demonstrate somehow that the dominance exists in a rigorous way.
- whoisjuan 5y ago
  I honestly think that the idea that social networking is monopolizable is absurd. There are billions of online person to person interactions that happen outside of Facebook. There are hundreds of thousands of websites and communities that allow communication, discussion and sharing of user generated content. There are hundreds of thousands of online spaces that provide an outlet to augment a message. So if anything, regulators should start by redefining what's a monopoly because the current definition clearly doesn't fit the classic narrative around monopolies.
Ericson2314 5y ago
Traditional notions of market share were companies selling commodities (oil, rail travel) with undifferentiated products. Now everything is extremely differentiated so it's hard to find any products that are clearly competing apples to apples. The markets of these things overlap funnily such I almost wonder if the graph of "quasi-competing" products is fully connected. ----- The institutional power of these firms isn't just in the things they sell. It is also in people's dependence on the non-fungible free services, etc. We do need new laws so issues with the courts in some sense are good to force the issue.
- lwhi 5y ago
  Surely these companies are advertising platforms selling attention?
  - Ericson2314 5y ago
    Absolutely. But isn't like one can trivially redirect part of an Instagram addiction into a YouTube one based on which company one hates less each morning.
    - lwhi 5y ago
      The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced the issue should focus on the effect a monopolistic company has on competition and new entrants. If a company is in the sights of Facebook, and could be acquired .. they should stand to benefit from any legislation put in place.
      - Ericson2314 5y ago
        > they should stand to benefit from any legislation put in place. Keep in mind many startups don't want to do the work of becoming an actual sustainable company, and rather have the higher values of the acquisition market. Also keep in mind that a more fragmented digital ads market without the total surveillance from monopolies might not be very profitable at all. I don't think a disaggregated private sector is capable an entirely filling big tech's vacuum. I also don't think that is a reason not to break up big tech. The fact is software wants to be free, and free software wants to be funded by something other than profits. But I don't think our courts or legislatures are willing to grapple with this truth. And so we will waffle and keep the monopolies intact.
brundolf 5y ago
Of all the big tech, Facebook seems like the least monopolistic to me. They have a totally different set of issues (ones that we may not have laws to deal with yet), mainly around having disproportionate power over society and the psyches of individual citizens. But "monopolist" feels like a pretty weak case.
- xxpor 5y ago
  Everyone's trying to shoehorn tech into existing frameworks because they know passing new laws is too hard. As the judge pointed out though, you can't just make shit up and expect to get away with it.
  - bilbo0s 5y ago
    We really need new laws, because the judge is right, most of these tech companies are just not monopolies. Google excepted. When it comes to FAANGs, in what world does Apple or Netflix have 85%+ market share? It's a ridiculous argument. But if you create a privacy law with draconian penalties, it's easy to show that most of these companies share data. In my mind, new privacy laws are the way to go. Strong privacy laws would stop most of these companies in their tracks. How many times do activists need to be laughed out of anti-trust courtrooms before we get the message that it's a route that probably won't work?
    - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
      Don’t forget that monopolization is not the only possible offense. Anti-competitive behavior is also an offense. Amazon, Facebook, and Google (especially Amazon and Google) have demonstrated all sorts of anti-competitive behavior. That’s different than privacy invasions, although there’s some overlap with advertising it’s not a complete overlap.
    - fooker 5y ago
      > it's easy to show that most of these companies share data No, it's not. Mainly because most of these companies do not share data directly. Even GDPR doesn't really do anything much to curb the power of these giants.
einpoklum 5y ago
> If you think about Facebook the consumer platform Facebook is not mainly a "consumer platform" (if at all).
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- disgruntledphd2 5y ago
  3 billion users probably disagree.
Glyptodon 5y ago
If the user demographics are significantly different when are they actually competitors vs. an entirely different market?
IncRnd 5y ago
Why are you separating Facebook, the consumer platform, and Facebook, the business, from each other? Neither can exist without the other, because they are the same business.
- thehappypm 5y ago
  No matter which part of Facebook you're looking at it's not a monopoly.
  - IncRnd 5y ago
    I never said it is. I pointed out that your distinction is artificial and incorrect. You cannot separate the consumer and business portions of Facebook from each other.
    - thehappypm 5y ago
      Ok
josefx 5y ago
Wouldn't counting Google as largest competitor actually strengthen the case? Those two companies did have their share of questionable, competition limiting backroom deals that leaked into the open.

TheAdamAndChe 5y ago

Thinking of Facebook merely as a consumer platform seems overly broad to me. Each of those are social networks, but they fill a particular niche in the social experience. YouTube is for asynchronous videos from people you generally don't directly know, Reddit is for pseudoanonymous communities, etc. Facebook's niche is in one-to-many communication with people you directly know. It's also arguably one of the stickiest forms of social network because of the strength of its network effects. There is very little real competition in that niche.

dageshi 5y ago
If you keep narrowing the focus down, every product becomes a monopoly on its functionality?
crazygringo 5y ago
Finding niches is how competition happens. Another term for it is market differentiation. Even if two products/companies start out identically, they quickly diverge somewhat. Pepsi doesn't copy Coca-Cola's marketing about being a sexy/mainstream drink, they create their own niche of being for younger independent personalities. When people choose to get their viral news from Reddit rather than Facebook, or their viral videos from YouTube rather than Facebook, that's competition period.
- TheAdamAndChe 5y ago
  The difference between Coke and Pepsi is marketing and flavor, but they directly compete in the same market. The products they have are virtually the same, only minor differences. The product differences between, say, Facebook and YouTube are night and day. You wouldn't add an acquaintance on YouTube and start messaging them through that platform. I'm not sure you can even message people like that on it anymore. But you can on Facebook. They're fundamentally different products, they only align because they both have some sort of social aspect to them. Kind of.
  - crazygringo 5y ago
    I'd look at it a different way: "Facebook" and "YouTube" aren't single products, but rather each one is a collection of something like 10-20 products that live on a single platform. For "viral videos", Facebook and YouTube (and Reddit) absolutely directly compete in the same market. For "educational videos", YouTube competes with other platforms. While for "tracking social acquaintances" Facebook competes with the Contacts apps by Apple and Google, as well as other messaging apps. Really there's no such product category as a "Facebook" or a "YouTube". And Facebook's original product category -- to keep track of social contacts and post public and private social messages -- is now only a tiny part of Facebook.
  - jjk166 5y ago
    Facebook and YouTube are both in the market for users to show advertising to, and generally every minute spent on one is a minute explicitly not spent on the other. If facebook were selling communication with friends, then YouTube would not be a competitor, but that's not Facebook's business, nor would anyone argue that Facebook has a monopoly on talking to your friends.
  - kube-system 5y ago
    This is a matter of perspective. Being intimately familiar with the differences between YouTube and Facebook, you can point out many differences. I'm sure if you were a food scientist or food marketing exec you could point out many difference between different soft drinks. These differences are market differentiators, not evidence of being in an entirely different market. Outside of the tech sphere, people see social media as a monolith in the same way that you see the soft drink industry.
- mr_toad 5y ago
  > Another term for it is market differentiation. Companies differentiate products to avoid competition. It’s marketing 101.
  - crazygringo 5y ago
    But... they're still competing. You don't think ballpoint pens and gel pens compete with each other? Just because the consumer gets more choice doesn't mean they're not competing.
MattGaiser 5y ago
You can define any company as a monopoly if you dig deep down enough through market segments and features.
- cycomanic 5y ago
  That argument goes the other way as well, you can construct every company as being not a monopoly by painting the market segment broad enough. I don't think this is a valid argument.
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    At least in the cases of Standard Oil and Bell, you would have needed to define the markets as energy and communication (including the post office) for them to not have had near total control. You could state the generalized product they sold and their total control was evident.
    - nightpool 5y ago
      How is "communication" not potentially as broad as "Social media platform"? Basically every form of digital communication falls under the banner of social media platform these days. (The GP comment cites Reddit, YouTube and SMS—as diverse a set of websites from Facebook (while still being communication-focused) as I could imagine)
  - huitzitziltzin 5y ago
    It is exactly a valid argument. The points you and the parent comment are making are the very heart of the issue in horizontal merger and monopolization cases: what is the relevant market? Draw it narrowly (I.e., convince the judge to accept a narrow market definition) and making the case against a merger or in favor of monopolization becomes easy. Convince the judge to draw it broadly and it becomes much harder to stop a merger or to make a monopolization claim.
    - cycomanic 5y ago
nindalf 5y ago
Hacker News is a monopoly in the social-news-aggregator-with-a-tech-focus-along-with-other-interesting-content-and-strong-moderation-space. dang better watch out for the FTC.
- scotuswroteus 5y ago
  -and-an-emphasis-on-downvoting-me

ethbr0 5y ago

Facebook the ad business is the monopoly. What really needs to happen is to amend monopoly definitions in cases where a captive market is present. The issue with Facebook isn't that they own 100% of the ad market, but that they control 100% of the Facebook ad market, which is itself large enough to constitute monopoly concerns. (As with Apple and Google app stores) Advertising is trickier than apps in terms of separation, but my gut says things would be better if companies with large captive market share were required to wholesale ad space and targeting via standardized mechanisms. And were specifically prohibited from developing any kind of value add ad products on top of their platforms. Just too much conflict of interest.

JumpCrisscross 5y ago
> isn't that they own 100% of the ad market, but that they control 100% of the Facebook ad market You need to define these terms in a way that doesn't make everything a monopoly. Because by this logic, my corner flower vendor has a monopoly on her corner and also on the flowers she is holding in her hand right now.
- ethbr0 5y ago
  Submarkets over a certain size, controlled by a single party
  - twoodfin 5y ago
    Like the “submarket” of Costco & Costco’s shelves?
  - MattGaiser 5y ago
    The submarket of Walmart shelves? This would basically ban any business that sells goods/services from going beyond a certain size.
    - dmoy 5y ago
      A fair point, because Walmart, Target, CVS, Costco, etc all vertically integrate and sell their own (often whitelabeled) products on their shelves, alongside other companies' goods.

Retric 5y ago

Saying Facebook and YouTube are direct completion seems like a huge stretch. Google made G+ specifically because as Far as Google was concerned it lacked a direct Facebook competitor. In what way can consumers substitute normal use like sharing photos with family members on Facebook with YouTube?

kube-system 5y ago
As a literal answer to your question, here's how to post photos on YouTube: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7124474 https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7124474 But if I understand correctly, determining whether two companies are competitors is more about their markets, rather than their feature sets. From the ruling text: > Although the precise definition of a “Personal Social Networking Service” is disputed (as that is the market in which Facebook has its alleged monopoly), it can be summarized here as one that enables users to virtually connect with others in their network and to digitally share their views and experiences by posting about them in a shared, virtual social space. YouTube would fit that definition.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- Retric 5y ago
  That’s not even vaguely the same thing. Still if in your opinion YouTube was a “Personal Social Networking Service” then why do you think Google have made G+?
  - kube-system 5y ago
    It's not my opinion, it's what the court said in plaintext. YouTube undeniably: "enables users to virtually connect with others in their network and to digitally share their views and experiences by posting about them in a shared, virtual social space." Competing on features != competing in a different market. Feature sets and markets are two very different things. What definition would you use to define Facebook's market?

twobitshifter 5y ago

Hypothetically, Facebook has a monopoly in social networking, but then they decide to launch a roblox clone tomorrow. Since they have a new product line where they don’t have a monopoly, we should look the other way? It’s true that Facebook exists in many spaces where they are not dominant but that does not diminish their dominance - in fact it’s their platform dominance that makes them so dangerous to smaller companies in other spaces.

graeme 5y ago
You’re commenting on a thread about reality, not a hypothetical, where the judge specifically called out reasoning such as yours that argues Facebook is a monopolist without defining terms or making concrete market share arguments.
MattGaiser 5y ago
> but that does not diminish their dominance - in fact it’s their platform dominance that makes them so dangerous to smaller companies in other spaces. You have to demonstrate somehow that the dominance exists in a rigorous way.
whoisjuan 5y ago
I honestly think that the idea that social networking is monopolizable is absurd. There are billions of online person to person interactions that happen outside of Facebook. There are hundreds of thousands of websites and communities that allow communication, discussion and sharing of user generated content. There are hundreds of thousands of online spaces that provide an outlet to augment a message. So if anything, regulators should start by redefining what's a monopoly because the current definition clearly doesn't fit the classic narrative around monopolies.

Ericson2314 5y ago

Traditional notions of market share were companies selling commodities (oil, rail travel) with undifferentiated products. Now everything is extremely differentiated so it's hard to find any products that are clearly competing apples to apples. The markets of these things overlap funnily such I almost wonder if the graph of "quasi-competing" products is fully connected. ----- The institutional power of these firms isn't just in the things they sell. It is also in people's dependence on the non-fungible free services, etc. We do need new laws so issues with the courts in some sense are good to force the issue.

lwhi 5y ago
Surely these companies are advertising platforms selling attention?
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  Absolutely. But isn't like one can trivially redirect part of an Instagram addiction into a YouTube one based on which company one hates less each morning.
  - lwhi 5y ago
    The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced the issue should focus on the effect a monopolistic company has on competition and new entrants. If a company is in the sights of Facebook, and could be acquired .. they should stand to benefit from any legislation put in place.
    - Ericson2314 5y ago
      > they should stand to benefit from any legislation put in place. Keep in mind many startups don't want to do the work of becoming an actual sustainable company, and rather have the higher values of the acquisition market. Also keep in mind that a more fragmented digital ads market without the total surveillance from monopolies might not be very profitable at all. I don't think a disaggregated private sector is capable an entirely filling big tech's vacuum. I also don't think that is a reason not to break up big tech. The fact is software wants to be free, and free software wants to be funded by something other than profits. But I don't think our courts or legislatures are willing to grapple with this truth. And so we will waffle and keep the monopolies intact.

brundolf 5y ago

Of all the big tech, Facebook seems like the least monopolistic to me. They have a totally different set of issues (ones that we may not have laws to deal with yet), mainly around having disproportionate power over society and the psyches of individual citizens. But "monopolist" feels like a pretty weak case.

xxpor 5y ago
Everyone's trying to shoehorn tech into existing frameworks because they know passing new laws is too hard. As the judge pointed out though, you can't just make shit up and expect to get away with it.
- bilbo0s 5y ago
  We really need new laws, because the judge is right, most of these tech companies are just not monopolies. Google excepted. When it comes to FAANGs, in what world does Apple or Netflix have 85%+ market share? It's a ridiculous argument. But if you create a privacy law with draconian penalties, it's easy to show that most of these companies share data. In my mind, new privacy laws are the way to go. Strong privacy laws would stop most of these companies in their tracks. How many times do activists need to be laughed out of anti-trust courtrooms before we get the message that it's a route that probably won't work?
  - TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
    Don’t forget that monopolization is not the only possible offense. Anti-competitive behavior is also an offense. Amazon, Facebook, and Google (especially Amazon and Google) have demonstrated all sorts of anti-competitive behavior. That’s different than privacy invasions, although there’s some overlap with advertising it’s not a complete overlap.
  - fooker 5y ago
    > it's easy to show that most of these companies share data No, it's not. Mainly because most of these companies do not share data directly. Even GDPR doesn't really do anything much to curb the power of these giants.

einpoklum 5y ago

> If you think about Facebook the consumer platform Facebook is not mainly a "consumer platform" (if at all).

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
disgruntledphd2 5y ago
3 billion users probably disagree.

Glyptodon 5y ago

If the user demographics are significantly different when are they actually competitors vs. an entirely different market?

IncRnd 5y ago

Why are you separating Facebook, the consumer platform, and Facebook, the business, from each other? Neither can exist without the other, because they are the same business.

thehappypm 5y ago
No matter which part of Facebook you're looking at it's not a monopoly.
- IncRnd 5y ago
  I never said it is. I pointed out that your distinction is artificial and incorrect. You cannot separate the consumer and business portions of Facebook from each other.
  - thehappypm 5y ago
    Ok

josefx 5y ago

Wouldn't counting Google as largest competitor actually strengthen the case? Those two companies did have their share of questionable, competition limiting backroom deals that leaked into the open.