One reason I'm skeptical on the government bringing down the antitrust hammer on Big Tech is because of things like this. Antitrust is a slow process and a crud

One reason I'm skeptical on the government bringing down the antitrust hammer on Big Tech is because of things like this. Antitrust is a slow process and a crude (but powerful) instrument. Facebook originally bought Instagram because IG represented an existential threat to FB's business. Remember it was only a few years old and had 13 employees at the time of acquisition. How can you be a monopoly when 13 people can threaten your business? So here we are some years later and Facebook is getting killed by Tiktok. IG, in particular, is no longer "sexy". it is not where influencers aspire to be anymore. Facebook proper has billions of DAU/MAU but many younger people don't even have acounts anymore. It's facing it's own myspace moment. FB (now Meta) is betting its future on something that (IMHO) will never happen: the Metaverse, much like how Uber (and even Tesla to a certain extent) were betting their futures on self-driving cars (both of which, much like AGI, are perennially 5-10 years away). The market will sort out FAcebook one way or the other. It requires no heavyhanded intervention. The MBA eventually turn every social media platform into an ecommerce platform because how else do you make money? When that happens that platform eventually dies. If you've been following IG redesigns, it's been moving further and further away from being creator-focused (eg the "create" button moved from the bottom bar to the top). IG has been pushing shopping, IGTV and other efforts to monetize the platform and/or tie it to commerce. Trying to clone Tiktok with Reels just isn't going to save it.