Has Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg in particular, ever really made a secret of being a ruthless anti-competitive asshole? I always thought that was his one redeeming trait - the fact that he was honest about it. True, he occasionally claimed in interviews to be about "bringing people together", but I always felt he went out of his way to make sure everyone listening knew he didn't mean it.
Facebook’s dominance is built on anti-competitive behavior
141–150 of 236 posts
Re: Facebook’s dominance is built on anti-competitive behavior
#142Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean like the democratically elected President wants to “shut down” Twitter?
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Do you care to expand or just quote a rule without context? Government power is always amplified because it has coercive power. It’s not just about Trump, it’s about any government power.
Re: Facebook’s dominance is built on anti-competitive behavior
#143Re: Facebook’s dominance is built on anti-competitive behavior
#144Earlier quoted context omitted.
But the difference is that "ALL OTHER" monopolies are priced whereas facebook is a free product. Can it be called a monopoly if your product is free? Pretty sure, most lawyers won't have a hard time convincing a jury that it can't be. Besides, if FB is a monopoly then so are Twitter, Google, Reddit, Quora, etc. Its an oligopoly of sorts with each player dominating a slightly differentiated product and all products ar…
FB's users are not it's customers. It is free for users, in the same way that food is free for cows in a diary. Indeed, the cows did not choose to live that life, but increasingly [not] having a facebook account is not an option. FB's customers are the advertisers. And they pay very good money, or FB wouldn't have had the money pay for WhatsApp, Instagram and its tens of thousands of employees.
>> but increasingly [not] having a facebook account is not an option.
but so is the case for google maps, gmail, linkedin, twitter, uber and a zillion other services. Facebook is just like any other web service at the end of the day.
>> FB's customers are the advertisers.
Even if that's true for arguments sake, I don't see how FB becomes a "monopoly" in that case. There are potentially large # of advertisers buying advertising space from potentially large # of website owners. How does FB have a monopoly on advertiser spending?
Re: Facebook’s dominance is built on anti-competitive behavior
#145Re: Facebook’s dominance is built on anti-competitive behavior
#146Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It’s a contradiction to say the network effect protects Facebook but at the same time say they had to buy Instagram because they were successfully competing despite the network effect. Facebook’s network effect didn’t stop Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp, etc. It's not a contradiction, since network effects can be unstable over time (e.g. people get older and young people "enter the pipeline," sometimes with differen…
I don’t follow how the existence of companies succeeding in the face of competitors with “network effects” supports the idea that network effects limit competition... I agree network effects are part of the value of the product, but I don’t see how that limits competition. Users can have both a Facebook and a Twitter, or Facebook and MySpace, etc. Network effects don’t stop people from joining other networks.
Because MySpace was a substitute good for Facebook and vice versa. If only a fraction of (certain strongly-connected) MySpace users
stop updating there and only use Facebook, MySpace's network effects collapse and thus competition decreases.
This is of course what happened. I joined Facebook when it was first opened for my school (long ago). I immediately loved the UI over the XSS dumpster fire that was MySpace, but I knew like two or three people there. I kind of forgot about it, but checked back a couple months later, and suddenly I knew a bunch of people on Facebook. My days of using MySpace at that point were basically over. The data indicates this was not merely an anecdote, but basically how MySpace died.
EDIT: Also, the way antitrust law is written, anything that has this kind of network effect will likely be a candidate for a monopoly. It's almost inevitable. The courts and legal establishment have over time added the criterion that antitrust should only be enforced when monopoly power harms consumer welfare (usually understood to mean higher prices), which is a much trickier proposition in the case of Facebook.
Re: Facebook’s dominance is built on anti-competitive behavior
#147Re: Facebook’s dominance is built on anti-competitive behavior
#148Antitrust laws were always based on supply side monopolies, while this is a demand side monopoly, and would be a tricky case for anti trust to prove. If the mandate is to do what is best for customers, then the best solution I can think of is to let FB function as one entity but toughen the norms on data collection. The other thing is Facebook should not inhibit any other social network trying to grow using FB's grap…
>Antitrust laws were always based on supply side monopolies
I don't think this is true. The idea that antitrust is only about supply and consumer benefit is extremely limited view. It came in flavor in the US late-1970's and it's known as "Chicago School of Antitrust Law". The defining book of that school is Robert Bork's 'The Antitrust Paradox' (1978).
Re: Facebook’s dominance is built on anti-competitive behavior
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The best solution to this would be regional alternatives operating on a shared standard. This would avoid the problem of values not reflecting your culture's values, not having to moderate billions of people, etc. You are just shifting the problem here to the edges between the different systems. > I'm not a fan of the US's bizarre mix of laissez-faire "fuck you" capitalism and systems of regulatory capture. If all…
"People will have vote with their actions if they want things to change." That isn't how monopolies work - while some people can individually make huge sacrificies and not use any Facebook product, in reality that isn't practical and few people will because they are a monopoly. This isn't like buying a car where there are multiple providers who all use the same roads and petrol. Or the mobile phone system, where ther…
If it was Facebook alone, I'd agree that people should have the choice.
But its not just Facebook. It's WhatsApp. It's Instagram (the 2nd largest network, no?)
It seems to be very anti-competitive to control 2/3 of the biggest social media platforms. They need broken up.