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> Meta could have chosen to compete with then-upstart photo sharing app Instagram in 2012, a senior FTC official said on a call with reporters ahead of the tria

> Meta could have chosen to compete with then-upstart photo sharing app Instagram in 2012, a senior FTC official said on a call with reporters ahead of the trial, but instead it bought it, and did the same with WhatsApp. This has a potentially very-chilling effect on acquisitions, which are a major source of liquidity for lots of secondary companies.

zombiwoof 2y ago
Maybe these companies should be built to last not be acquired into monolithic borgs
- lenerdenator 2y ago
  But then they'd have to compete and not just shovel more money into the pockets of major individual shareholders, along with the retirement and pension funds of a generation that needs to drastically scale back its post-career ambitions.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
teeklp 2y ago
[dead]
huitzitziltzin 2y ago
The large tech firms get a surprisingly large amount of hate on antitrust issues on this website for startups so I appreciate your point bc I think it’s often missed.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  It's almost as if people want to create companies that satisfy somebody's need, instead of pretending to be large so it gets brought...
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- int_19h 2y ago
  HN might want to be a website for VC startups, but I don't think the community here has been about that for a very long time now.
burkaman 2y ago
Creating a chilling effect on acquisitions is the whole point of antitrust law.
jchw 2y ago
I'd kill for a chilling effect on acquisitions. Every single fucking time something I like gets acquired, it takes anywhere between a few months to a couple years before it is completely ruined. Maybe if we're lucky, Microsoft will acquire Discord and run it into the ground the way they did with Skype. (Then, we can all go back to IRC, right? ... Right, guys?)
- fallingknife 2y ago
  If that were true then acquisitions would be great for competition.
  - jchw 2y ago
    Well in most cases you just ate your competition, so there's not a whole lot to care about. The hardest part of competing with encumbants, especially when it comes to stuff like social media and IM, is acquiring users, due to those coveted network effects. When you look at what happened with Discord, it was able to swoop in when there was somewhat of a vacuum building with Microsoft-owned Skype being completely shit, MSN and AIM falling way out of fashion, and IRC... continuing to be IRC. Then they took advantage of something relatively new; they could lower the barrier to entry. Most existing IM networks required you to download a client to really use it, but Discord, just being a web app, you could log in from a browser and get the full experience. And if you needed to jump in quickly, you could literally just enter a name and start using it immediately, at least in the early days. That doesn't happen often. What usually happens is the company that acquires the software makes use of the asset they actually care about (the users they just paid for) and now they don't have to do all of that hard work of actually acquiring the users by making a better product and marketing it. (Nevermind that they're almost certainly better-resourced to do that than the company that they are acquiring.) A large minority of users are very unhappy with the enshittification of the service, but most users don't really care much since they are pretty casual and a lot of them may not have even known things to be much better anyways. Microsoft squandering Skype seems to be the result of a lot of things at once, ranging from incompetence to the complexity that the P2P nature of Skype brought with it (at least early on.) For example, look at Twitter. Elon Musk could do basically anything wrong but it has such a long history and so many users that it really is hard to squander it entirely, even after making many grossly unpopular moves. Don't get me wrong, Mastodon and Bluesky are doing fine, and it's also fine that neither of them are likely to ever really take over the number one spot in their niche; they still function just fine. But Twitter will always be the place where basically everything happens among them, even if the people who care the most absolutely hate the shit out of it. I wish more acquisitions did go like Skype, only much faster.
JumpCrisscross 2y ago
> has a potentially very-chilling effect on acquisitions I don’t buy it. An independent Instagram would have both been another potential acquirer and a pocketful of cash for investors who might fund another round.
dehrmann 2y ago
It's actually worse that that. Making acquisitions hard is one thing; changing the rules post hoc is another.
- arrosenberg 2y ago
  Antitrust law explicitly allows the government to unwind acquisitions if they are later determined to be anticompetitive. How else would you deal with a company like Meta who has done exactly that?
arrosenberg 2y ago
Good. We need companies that produce economic value, not landlords seeking rent.

zombiwoof 2y ago

Maybe these companies should be built to last not be acquired into monolithic borgs

lenerdenator 2y ago
But then they'd have to compete and not just shovel more money into the pockets of major individual shareholders, along with the retirement and pension funds of a generation that needs to drastically scale back its post-career ambitions.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

teeklp 2y ago

[dead]

huitzitziltzin 2y ago

The large tech firms get a surprisingly large amount of hate on antitrust issues on this website for startups so I appreciate your point bc I think it’s often missed.

marcosdumay 2y ago
It's almost as if people want to create companies that satisfy somebody's need, instead of pretending to be large so it gets brought...
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
int_19h 2y ago
HN might want to be a website for VC startups, but I don't think the community here has been about that for a very long time now.

burkaman 2y ago

Creating a chilling effect on acquisitions is the whole point of antitrust law.

jchw 2y ago

I'd kill for a chilling effect on acquisitions. Every single fucking time something I like gets acquired, it takes anywhere between a few months to a couple years before it is completely ruined. Maybe if we're lucky, Microsoft will acquire Discord and run it into the ground the way they did with Skype. (Then, we can all go back to IRC, right? ... Right, guys?)

fallingknife 2y ago
If that were true then acquisitions would be great for competition.
- jchw 2y ago
  Well in most cases you just ate your competition, so there's not a whole lot to care about. The hardest part of competing with encumbants, especially when it comes to stuff like social media and IM, is acquiring users, due to those coveted network effects. When you look at what happened with Discord, it was able to swoop in when there was somewhat of a vacuum building with Microsoft-owned Skype being completely shit, MSN and AIM falling way out of fashion, and IRC... continuing to be IRC. Then they took advantage of something relatively new; they could lower the barrier to entry. Most existing IM networks required you to download a client to really use it, but Discord, just being a web app, you could log in from a browser and get the full experience. And if you needed to jump in quickly, you could literally just enter a name and start using it immediately, at least in the early days. That doesn't happen often. What usually happens is the company that acquires the software makes use of the asset they actually care about (the users they just paid for) and now they don't have to do all of that hard work of actually acquiring the users by making a better product and marketing it. (Nevermind that they're almost certainly better-resourced to do that than the company that they are acquiring.) A large minority of users are very unhappy with the enshittification of the service, but most users don't really care much since they are pretty casual and a lot of them may not have even known things to be much better anyways. Microsoft squandering Skype seems to be the result of a lot of things at once, ranging from incompetence to the complexity that the P2P nature of Skype brought with it (at least early on.) For example, look at Twitter. Elon Musk could do basically anything wrong but it has such a long history and so many users that it really is hard to squander it entirely, even after making many grossly unpopular moves. Don't get me wrong, Mastodon and Bluesky are doing fine, and it's also fine that neither of them are likely to ever really take over the number one spot in their niche; they still function just fine. But Twitter will always be the place where basically everything happens among them, even if the people who care the most absolutely hate the shit out of it. I wish more acquisitions did go like Skype, only much faster.

JumpCrisscross 2y ago

> has a potentially very-chilling effect on acquisitions I don’t buy it. An independent Instagram would have both been another potential acquirer and a pocketful of cash for investors who might fund another round.

dehrmann 2y ago

It's actually worse that that. Making acquisitions hard is one thing; changing the rules post hoc is another.

arrosenberg 2y ago
Antitrust law explicitly allows the government to unwind acquisitions if they are later determined to be anticompetitive. How else would you deal with a company like Meta who has done exactly that?

arrosenberg 2y ago

Good. We need companies that produce economic value, not landlords seeking rent.