If only there were some kind of federal agency, maybe a "trade commission" that could have blocked these mergers when they originally happened ....
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 produ…
> When they originally happened, people thought Zuck was insane.
Maybe that's a sign that the acquisitions deserved more scrutiny?
There's no way to provide access to the social graph in a privacy preserving way. It's not okay to allow a third party to access the data your friends have shared with you without your friends consenting. Unencumbered API access to the social graph is exactly what led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and promising to restrict API access was part of Facebook's settlement with the FTC.
It's kind of amazing how most even tech people don't seem to understand this.
The comment says "there's no way." I can think of at least one which involves a user manually downloading the data and then manually uploading it to another service.
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?
The lawsuit is about Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram effectively roping in users from other platforms into their advertising ecosystem. The monetisation of your data in exchange for adverts can be seen as the cost of the platforms. By aggressively increasing advertising on Instagram and attempting to take steps to monetize WhatsApp, Facebook are raising prices. As far as I understand the question is…
> The monetisation of your data in exchange for adverts can be seen as the cost of the platforms. It will be interesting to see the government prove this for Facebook while ignoring the 800lb gorillas of Google/Doubleclick or Amazon’s ad network.
I don’t think Google’s being ignored, they got served just a couple of months ago literally Re: their ad network monopoly
Install the uMatrix extension. Blacklist anything from facebook.com and fb.com. Now their tracking pixels can't see you.
Just in case you weren't aware, uMatrix has been deprecated and will receive no further development, including fixes. It still runs fine now, but it may not in the future.
Thank you! I was not. The GitHub repo has indeed been archived.[1]
Any ideas where to go for similar functionality that will be supported in the future?
> Acquisitions were no brainer for Facebook. And hindsight is 20/20.
At least in the case of instagram you didnt need hindsight to know it was a good deal. Lots of people thought they price they paid was incredible value on the day it was announced. Plenty of ink has been spilled that year about facebook potentially being in trouble with mobile and instagram seemed at the time to be an obvious solution to the problem.
That is not my recollection whatsoever. A quick read through the HN reactions that day (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817840) shows a mix of bewilderment and belief that this is a defensive play. Very few people actually opined that Instagram represented much actual value.
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-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 profi…
You can't really compete with FAANG. They are too big. They just destroy or buy all competitors. Especially Facebook.
With both Google and Facebook, mandatory licensing of their advertising inventory (within reason) would help competitors grow. Advertisers want to buy on Facebook/Google because they are the only two ad platforms with quality and scale. Companies like Pinterest/Twitter/Snapchat don't have the enough scale to be interesting to most advertisers. Programatic marketplaces (Adwords, etc.) have the scale, but not the quality (too many spammy publishers and lack of identity resolution across the marketplace). If the big two digital ad platforms were required to license their premium inventory, other companies could invest in their products and gain substantial incremental revenues as consumers started using them. With current business practice, you need to reach massive scale before you can even think about monetizing at reasonable rate ($30+ CPM).
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 adjustment…
In some sense this lawsuit is saying that the regulatory approvals of the Instagram and Whatsapp acquisitions were errors. How is the market going to fix that?
It's not, because it makes them a bucket of money. Only in hindsight with an FTC in the final days of a mercurial administration do we get stuff like this.
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 com…
> 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.
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.