141–150 of 736 posts
Instagram and WhatsApp are old news. The big chip on the board is Oculus. If they can get Facebook to sever Oculus (and Facebook "Reality Labs", something probably created ahead of this to blur the lines at bit) it would be a huge step forward to mitigate huge harms to come from Facebook.
If you work at Facebook it's time to seriously consider leaving to avoid damage to your own brand. Future employers are going to be scrutinizing your record and will ask you difficult questions about why you stuck by Facebook despite an overwhelming consensus that they are damaging to the global social fabric.
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Oculus doesn't present a monopoly concern in advertising, though.
Just wait until you slip into the Oculus 5 and enjoy a movie night with your friends anywhere in the world! Oh what’s that? Your eyes looked at the logo on the shirt the hero is wearing, are you perhaps interested in learning more about where you could buy it?
> The complaint also alleges that Facebook, over many years, has imposed anticompetitive conditions on third-party software developers’ access to valuable interconnections to its platform, such as the application programming interfaces (“APIs”) that allow the developers’ apps to interface with Facebook. In particular, Facebook allegedly has made key APIs available to third-party applications only on the condition tha…
> On one hand, forcing Facebook to open up its social graph would have serious privacy implications. There shouldn't be much additional privacy concern with a Facebook user saying "I trust user Alice and service example.com, so please send all my posts to alice@example.com using ActivityPub." Similarly, Alice should be able to tell example.com that she trusts the Facebook user Bob with ID 123456789, so that example.c…
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Splitting those two properties off would be fantastic. I know it's a pipe dream, but an independent Oculus would make me so happy. I suspect this is impossible due to the early nature of the VR market. Maybe just an FTC requirement _not_ to require a FB login?
Ugh, yeah Facebook probably bought Oculus thinking: -What if a lot of people use these in the future -What if they're really comfy when they get slim, and people use them all the time, even for essentially web browsing. -Later models can easily have internal and mouth facing cameras so you can smile at people in VR -Let's intimately observe the finest twitch of every expression felt by our users, peering deep into th…
How would splitting Instagram work from a technical perspective? Engineers have spent 8 years building shared code and data centers for FB and IG. I'd expect it would take hundreds of people and multiple years to untangle them.
As far as I know the biggest change was hosting the pictures on Facebook server infrastructure. So it requires copying the pictures to another infrastructure and replacing the URLs ? Of course it will be a huge task but I don't think that FB and IG are sharing a lot of code.
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Having a Facebook account is a symbolic/emotional injury to a tech contrarian, but I don’t see the courts particularly caring about that. It’s not like you have to actually spend any time or money on it.
Is that actually a criteria in antitrust?
Having an entry in Facebook’s users table is a long way from using Facebook for your social networking to the exclusion of competitors.
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Could the average Facebook user readily replace their use of Facebook with LinkedIn or TikTok? I am not a big user of any of those products, but I have the distinct impression that the answer is no.
From the FTC.gov[1]: "The antitrust laws prohibit conduct by a single firm that unreasonably restrains competition by creating or maintaining monopoly power. Most Section 2 claims involve the conduct of a firm with a leading market position, although Section 2 of the Sherman Act also bans attempts to monopolize and conspiracies to monopolize. As a first step, courts ask if the firm has "monopoly power" in any market.…
For a time people had few alternatives to Instagram or Facebook, which were effectively in competition with each other. This meant that has Facebook monetised your data more, ie increase prices, users were forced to pay if they wanted to stay on a popular social network.
TikTok is a recent phenomenon. Secondly it is not enough to consider the UX cost of switching to another platform but also the network effect. Is Mewe/Parker/Gab really a substitute for me if I don’t enjoy the network effects I have on Facebook or Instagram?
The most interesting part to developers: they may require facebook to offer certain APIs? > The complaint also alleges that Facebook, over many years, has imposed anticompetitive conditions on third-party software developers’ access to valuable interconnections to its platform, such as the application programming interfaces (“APIs”) that allow the developers’ apps to interface with Facebook. In particular, Facebook a…
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 term 'monopoly' is confusing because the pedantic definition is that there's only one player but this isn't the legal definition. It's not actually illegal to be a monopoly but to illegally abuse your market position leading to anti-competitive behavior. Unfortunately, it's never enforce properly as the FTC doesn't have any teeth. I think the only way we're going to solve this is to actually TAX these companies a…
I’m still confused as to which “market” is harmed: advertisers? Facebook users? other social networks?
If the market is Facebook users, what’s the precedent in asserting this level of harm to a market that consists substantially of non-paying users of an inessential service?