> "The FTC's lawsuit against Meta defies reality. The evidence at trial will show what every 17-year-old in the world knows: Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp compete with Chinese-owned TikTok, YouTube, X, iMessage and many others," Meta spokesperson Chris Sgro said in a statement.
Everyone knew at the time that Facebook bought Instagram because it threatened Facebook's dominance, and hindsight shows that exactly that happened. There's a huge swath of people that dropped off FB and now use Insta, but Meta owns both. It was a great move but it was absolutely anti-competitive at the time.
Other articles posted about this:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/technology/meta-antitrust... (https://archive.ph/8wOPP)
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/14/media/meta-ftc-trial/index.ht...
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/13/meta-zuckerberg-ftc...
(I've omitted the HN links this time because there weren't any comments yet. Someday we're going to do proper URL bundling and karma sharing for cases like this, where multiple submitters post good articles on the same underlying story.)
Karma sharing would be huge. That's a great idea and I think would increase the overall quality of links a lot. At least worth a shot.
This is a pretty fun link:
https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
The leaderboard system is interesting because they don’t actually show numbers for the top 10(to de-incentivize farming battles I assume).
If you look at the top profile, tptacek, you can see they have a little over 400k karma and they are active(posted two days ago).
Thanks to Thomas people like him who make this site fun!
I don't understand the FTC's strategy here. Their entire case hinges on the fact that the judge will accept that Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat and MeWe (?) are direct competitors of Facebook in the "personal social networking" space while TikTok, YouTube, X, iMessage and all the rest aren't. Unsurprisingly that is what Meta's legal team is spending all of its efforts debating. I really can't see the judge allowing such a cherry-picked definition of what Facebook's market is.
The definition of a trust isn't a business with no competitors. In fact, a business with no competitors is legal. Antitrust law limits "anti-competitive actions," which are possible even for commodity producers in an efficient market.
Exactly! So what is anti competitive here?
Facebook knew that Instagram was up and coming and instead of competing, it just bought it.
You can read more about initial complaint and following the trial here: https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/zuckerberg-on-the-stand-the...
If the purpose of an acquisition is to quash competition that is bad. Monopolies are bad.
Another purpose of acquisitions is to acquire a new capability that you could not do in house that you do not already compete on.
A true accounting of board level corporate motivations is not available. The standard line is typically something like “we are acquiring our smaller rival to more effectively compete with our larger rival”. I.e “we are acquiring a small desktop publishing start up to compete with the largest cloud computing provider”. Or in this case: “we are acquiring a small photo sharing company to compete against Google/Youtube”.
Isn't this the purpose of most acquisitions?
No, it's not. It is not normal or usual. Not even in the tech industry.
And once they bought them, then Instagram wasn't a competitor any more. That's how it's anti-competitive.
The government has alleged that Meta's acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram was done to reduce competition. Nothing has been established as anti-competitive or not yet, that's why it's in court. Evidence from both sides will be presented. I'm not sure how else to answer that question.
Its not the same as forcing them to shut down or say yes. They wanted one less competitor yes, as every company does, but they didn't prevent the company from growing and existing.
It’s perfectly fine to do anti-competitive actions. They’re fundamental to most businesses survival, actually.
It’s not fine to do them to create, expand, protect, attempt to create, etc. monopolies.
So essentially, you can be anti-competitive only to the point where you’ve been too successful at it, then it’s bad.
Buying a rising product to make sure you control it instead of needing to compete with it is not legal when you're the size of Facebook.
Well - it invites people creating big promises and then selling, which doesn't help the consumer.
Further advancements in litigation will likely reveal additional information.
Usually you do that before the trial. Using that as the tactic is shady. Although this has always had the vibe of being about clamping down on big tech power not protecting upstarts. So the goals might be broader. A lever to pull through threats of more of this.
That's basically every antitrust case. Is Window's market IBM-compatible PCs/laptops, or does it include Macs and chromebooks as well? What about other computing devices like tablets/phones, given that many households (especially in poorer countries) don't even have PCs/laptops?
Thankfully there are multiple ways to probe this question:
"Did Microsoft sell Windows at a loss?"
Now you don't have to define the market. Microsoft did it for you.
Also what if they own multiple apps in the space? I don't get the anti competitiveness here. People can still create new apps and even say no to an acquisition once they become successful.
It's a good strategy because that's the obvious distinction and there's an easy litmus test (which apps do people use their real names on). Don't be ridiculous with iMessage.
What's the "obvious distinction" and "easy litmus test" that WhatsApp directly competes with Facebook while iMessage is not in the same space? What about Instagram and TikTok?
iMessage is not a business; it's just a messaging feature. There are no ads or 3rd party content or anything. The easy litmus test is the one I just gave; users generally don't use their real names on tiktok.
I mean it's not much more unreasonable then the argument that iphones and android phones don't compete but courts bought that.
A court didn’t buy that: the district court and 9th Circuit both held that iOS and Android compete in the Epic v. Apple case.
A jury however found that the relevant market in the Epic v. Google case was just Android. Google is understandably appealing that to the 9th Circuit.
As someone who’s stuck with Whatsapp and no way out (friends and family won’t switch), I dearly hope for a split.
I do struggle to understand how we here casually lump tohether totally different platforms as comptetitors.
It’s not like I can use Youtube or Tiktok instead of Whatsapp with my family for direct and group discussion. Even X and Instagram would be a stretch, as their raison d’être is public social media and not instant messaging.
Sure the platforms have overlapping features, but you ain’t gonna use a knife insted of a spoon.
YouTube, X, and Tiktok compete with Meta's products in different verticals so it's not really a fair comparison. But at the same time WhatsApp is drowning in competition from a thousand different messengers so I'm not sure if this point really matters.
Like X isn't competing with FB Marketplace but Craigslist sure is. TikTok isn't competing with FB Events but Apple Events and Eventbrite are.
As long as WhatsApp have a strong backer like Meta, then using the term competition is meaningless. In many countries, WA is the de facto IM platform, but I can bet that it hasn't received a dim from those users. So how do they pay their developers, infrastructure, and surrounding resources?
> As someone who’s stuck with Whatsapp and no way out (friends and family won’t switch), I dearly hope for a split.
But what will it change for users? you'll still be stuck with What's app, except that it won't be owned by Meta.
Yeah, 100% agree - calling all these platforms "competitors" just because they exist on the same internet feels like tech company lawyer logic, not reality.
Use email. Everyone has an email address and it's socially awkward for them if they don't respond. Also has all the benefits of being an open protocol rather than a corporate garden.
using an email for chat like people use whatsapp is not practical
it's a matter of UI.
It even has E2EE, as long as people use the same client (or a compatible one).
>[…] it's socially awkward for them if they don't respond
Out of corporate contexts, email is only used to register for services, newsletters, and recover passwords. It's a shame, I prefer email over messaging for anything non-urgent.
> It’s not like I can use Youtube or Tiktok instead of Whatsapp with my family for direct and group discussion.
What's wrong with Signal? Or, worst-case scenario, Telegram?
> What's wrong with Signal? Or, worst-case scenario, Telegram?
IMO from a technical perspective nothing but more of how do you get your entire network to migrate from one chat app to another. Everyone here says just get your parents, siblings, friends to switch but it's far more complicated than that.
My wife is from Brazil and uses WA all the time. Getting her to switch would mean getting her entire network of family and friends to switch and you would have to make that pitch to everyone in the "network". All of a sudden it goes from getting a few people to switch to getting literally thousands to switch which is next to impossible.
Plus, all carriers in Brazil exempts WhatsApp from data caps (zero-rating). They are working on remove other apps from zero-rating, but WhatsApp is harder to since it's synonymous to “messages” here and alternatives are expensive (SMS) or not as near widespread (Telegram is a far runner-up mostly used for its semi-public, huge groups).
Is there some law that you can only use a single messaging app ?
It’s hard to overstate the pervasiveness of WhatsApp in some some countries. Where I’m from work, service hiring, costumer service, etc are all conducted through (and specially for small businesses only though) WhatsApp.
That's very true, in the same way that some countries seem to prefer using Facebook as "websites" for small businesses.
But this doesn't stop people from migrating their private interactions away from WhatsApp/Meta, by using using -as an example- Signal as their replacement app of choice where they can. The frictional cost of keeping WhatsApp for business interaction, and Signal for private interaction is fairly close to zero.
What's the use case for using Telegram over Whatsapp? At least the latter has proper end-to-end encryption of content?
You're srewed either way if you live in the USA.
> 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.
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?)
Its more likely we like the things we like because they're still in their "Acquire users" phase, and haven't run out of VC funding yet. Once they they get acquired, they quickly transition to the "squeeze every penny out of those users" phase we all know and love.
Gee if only there was a middle ground between these two extremes and the market somehow sought to achieve that state. Perhaps some simple market regulations might achieve this? And some enforcement of those regulations fairly and reasonably? Maybe a specific agency tasked with this?
If that's true then the downside to chilling acquisitions becomes... fewer "nice" things destined to rug-pull their users? Still not seeing the problem.
> Once they they get acquired, they quickly transition to the "squeeze every penny out of those users" phase
Instagram had less than a tenth of its current user base when it was bought [1].
Objection: relevance
Personally, I always liked things that never had an "acquire users" phase, or VC funding, but those things are less shiny (and frankly, less user-friendly.)
Shoutout Mullvad VPN, honorable mention to Tailscale (they had an acquire users phase and VC funding but a rug pull does not seem likely for the time being).
Discord's recent UI updates (updated skins, or whatever it's called) show they can do a great job of running their own product into the ground just fine.
https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/users-call-for-discord...
I don’t think we can go back to some things like ircd or mud talkers because they are too “chatty” to users. People like simplified centralized services with on screen discovery in the form of popups. The small internet will have to stay small
That'd be more than fine with me, except the small internet competes for attention with the rest of the internet and gets slaughtered by their attention-sucking applications with shiny animations, spammy push notifications, gamification and manipulative FOMO-inducing tricks. This means that the "small internet" for any given niche is very, very small, even compared to what it would've been a long time ago on a vastly smaller internet.
User retention aside... Nobody can even find the small internet. It's out there and there are search engines, but even if Google magically wasn't utterly ruined by SEO SPAM, people just don't Google their special interests as much directly anymore. (I can tell from search analytics!) So aside from a struggle to keep users engaged in small communities, there's also not very many users entering smaller communities either, certainly not enough to counteract the bleed.
Maybe it actually can be alright for a niche as relatively large as hiking, but I think it has done some real damage to smaller niches, which seem to struggle to maintain active forums.
Sounds like someone just hasn't come up with the right app to act as an abstraction layer over the protocol.
We don't always need to know everything that happened all the time, whether it's online or meatspace happenings. If my IRC connection dropped back in the day, and there was something that happened in that timeframe that was truly worth hearing about, I'd find out eventually.
There's something to be said, at least in my opinion, about keeping a healthy dose of ephemerality in our lives.
How is that any different than when you actually use an IRC client? You leave the chat, you leave the chat. If you're at a social gather or kick back or whatevs, if you leave the convo, the rest of the people in the group do not enter a freeze state until your return. The conversation keeps going. There's no history or log for you to scroll to catch up. You just re-enter the conversation. How you handle yourself at that point easily shows if you're nice or an asshole. Just like in IRC.
When you build a company, if you're looking to cash out and work on something else, it's either going to be by selling shares or getting acquired. Getting acquired can certainly be much less of a headache and risk vs going public or finding private investors to buy out a portion of your shares.
What makes you think the products you like will even be launched, if the acquisition pathway to success is not available?
Most of my favorite services are either foss based or owned privately with minimal VC.
I think maybe everyone should adjust their definition of success to include treating users fairly long term instead of milking them over prolonged enshittification periods.
TBF Skype wasn't profitable when MS bought it, it every much was in the line of make something everyone wants to use and figure out how to make money later. Skype was more or less free to use and it didn't make enough from paid services to cover its operating costs if I remember correctly. So it was always someone buys it or it dies.
The point of many of those companies is to get bought out and then get enshitified or stripped for its IP and integrated into for profit products.
Discord is very much in the same boat of build user base, then either sell or lock people in and charge a lot. It's current model is unsustainable. It will get bought out or enshitify eventually, there's no other sustainable model unless every user starts handing them money every month like its Netflix.
People here used to know this, are we getting an eternal September? Comments are getting more and more "reddit" like.
> Discord is very much in the same boat of build user base, then either sell or lock people in and charge a lot. It's current model is unsustainable. It will get bought out or enshitify eventually, there's no other sustainable model unless every user starts handing them money every month like its Netflix.
I haven't looked at their financials, but I wouldn't be surprised if their current subscription offerings targeting power users were enough to support the service.
While that might be true on a systems level, individual companies can choose their own destiny and many companies have chosen to operate over long time periods while making less than maximum potential revenue.
> People here used to know this, are we getting an eternal September? Comments are getting more and more "reddit" like.
What?! I do know this, and take great offense to the insinuation that my comment is "reddit"-like. I didn't feel it necessary to iterate over how VCware works since, as you said, everyone already gets that part.
Anyway, the "this place is getting more like Reddit by the day" thing has been a Hacker News staple for (well) over a decade too. Check the end of the HN guidelines, you'll have a chuckle.
I'm confused, is familiarity with it somehow an argument for it?
As I understand, the complaint was that things get ruined once acquired. Great, we all know that it's in part because of unsustainable business models in the hope of getting acquired*. Does that mean we have to like it? Wouldn't it be nice to encourage companies to have sustainable business models?
*But also not entirely. Even if you build a sustainable business model, for you it's throwing off profit and that's gravy for you. But once someone buys it from you, suddenly they are in the hole and have an investment to recoup, especially if they overpaid. And so the temptation arises to goose things to pay back that investment more quickly
> Most of these services that we enjoy simply aren't sustainable and are running on borrowed time (or VC money).
That's also what HN said about Uber and many other services still running today, including old Twitter.
If that were true then acquisitions would be great for competition.
Post-acquisition products can still dominate their market even if they have declining quality. E.g. they can be bundled with other offerings from the parent company. This is exactly the point of anti-trust.
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.
I hated Twitter before and after the acquisition, for a number of reasons. The last time I really liked Twitter was probably 2015. It's hard to qualify everything that was wrong with Twitter, but it'll probably be somewhat overshadowed by the Musk era because Musk is such a big dumbass. He also didn't really resolve a lot of Twitter's old issues with ideological bias, he just replaced it with less popular ideological bias. Twitter doesn't really feel like it is any less of a hellscape where people get banned for wrongthink, it just leans differently in high profile decisions...
Creating a chilling effect on acquisitions is the whole point of antitrust law.
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.
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.
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...
Maybe these companies should be built to last not be acquired into monolithic borgs
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.
It's actually worse that that. Making acquisitions hard is one thing; changing the rules post hoc is another.
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?
> 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.
Good. We need companies that produce economic value, not landlords seeking rent.
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Shout out to https://www.bigtechontrial.com/ which covered Google Trial and is now covering Facebook trial.
Disclaimer: Matt Stoller is big on anti monopoly so he's in support of government in both cases but overall, his coverage is really good and more details than you will probably get from other outlets.
Why the disclaimer? We know that monopolies make bad platform owners.
I do not understand what leg the FTC has to stand on in this case at all.
I know the company is quite unpopular, but from an objective legal standpoint I don't see how you can make an antitrust/anticompetitive argument here.
They don't need to be a literal monopoly to be guilty of anti-competitive practices.
FTC does in fact need to show (directly or through indirect evidence) that Meta has monopoly power in a relevant market and that it abused that power in order to win a Section 2 case.
If the relevant market ends up including TikTok or YouTube, FTC will be unable to make that showing.
What's the point of getting FTC approval of an acquisition in the first place if they can just go back a decade later and undo it?
They can’t just undo it but they can challenge it in court.
But you are right, in a way the FTC is appealing their own decision [1]. US politics can be quite mad at times.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2012/08/...
> "US politics can be quite mad at times."
No question about the truth of that statement.
However, though the FTC approved the acquisition 10 years ago, the current FTC commissioners have evidently concluded that in the interim things have changed. Whether the court agrees with the FTC's logic remains to be seen.
> What's the point of getting FTC approval
Efficiency? The people at the FTC reviewing mergers can't be experts of every corner of the economy, but if they catch an illegal merger during the approval process it can be blocked early without having to go to court.
An illegal merger is illegal no matter what. It's the corporation's responsibility to not break the law.
I'm positive that OP understands the reason for an FTC approval. Why did you cut the quote off in the middle of the sentence? The point is about why it's acceptable for the FTC to approve something, and then years later come back and change the decision.
I was too lazy to add an ellipsis. I was replying to the whole comment.
> The point is about why it's acceptable for the FTC to approve something, and then years later come back and change the decision.
I addressed that in my comment (it was the entire point of my comment, actually)
It seems inefficient to retcon mergers as illegal a decade later. A merger is not necessarily black and white illegal or legal; just something vague on a grey spectrum that the FTC happens to be choosing to color an argument for one way or the other depending on current administrative priorities.
Conversely: if Facebook lies their ass off to the FTC to get their mergers approved, why should we accept those lies as immutable truth?
Is that what the FTC is claiming happened?
I hope so. When WhatsApp was acquired, they claimed that it would not be possible to cross-reference users between Facebook and WhatsApp. On both platforms users were required to provide a phone number. Cross-referencing users was trivial, and it's still amazing that this lie was accepted as truth at the time.
That's just the concept of judicial review.
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What's the argument exactly? What prevents competition from starting a new social network or a new messaging app?
Indeed there is a huge number of successful messaging apps (imessage, signal, telegram, wire, wechat, kakao) and social networks (tiktok, snapchat, linkedin, reddit)
I know we're supposed to hate on facebook but what exactly is anti competitive?
I think Whatsapp is the clearest possible case that can be made of any company? They violated the condition of not sharing user data with Facebook
Willing to listen to other opinions on other companies, but surely Whatsapp
That was a voluntary pledge the company made to the users, right? It wasn't a legally binding commitment that there would never ever be any data sharing.
Dear Users, in our Terms of Service, we tell you that we won't share your data.
Psych, it wasn't legally binding.
Correct. A promise is not legally binding unless there is some sort of payment in return. The exception is if you can prove you suffered monetary damages from relying on that promise, which is basically impossible for data sharing.
> promise is not legally binding unless there is some sort of payment in return
If I recall correctly, I gave them a worldwide, perpetual license to some data.
> if you can prove you suffered monetary damages
This is a separate question (that of calculating damages) from that of whether there was a breach per se.
I can't sell my data to willing buyers for the same price anymore, because Meta illegally shared my data which reduced its value, and that's on top of the lost revenue I could have made selling my data to Meta if I was whatsapp only user.
Oh wait, I forgot those arguments only apply when companies are getting the government to go after people sharing files
Is it not at the very least false advertising?
It came with a threat that you'd lose your account of you didn't approve. That's hardly voluntary.
Is this relevant to the antitrust case?
Not a fan of Meta and I don't have IG, Facebook, WhatsApp etc.
However, even in 2012 or so when these acquisitions happened, Snapchat was a much bigger thing. And for me, Reddit was a much bigger thing than FB.
I think amongst the antitrust trials, this one is the weakest.
Fair take, but I think the key distinction is why Instagram and WhatsApp were targeted specifically
Regardless of where you land on Meta's ethics, this case feels like a high-stakes stress test for retroactive antitrust enforcement. If the FTC succeeds here, it basically rewrites the "finality" of M&A decisions in tech... and that'll ripple way beyond Meta.
What has actually changed in the last 13 years regarding Whatsapp? Video. And I believe that's the reason why anyone hasn't actually challenged them regarding messaging: you can build a similar application with similar features with a rather small group of people (not saying it's easy, but it's feasible). But handling those pentabytes of bandwith shared every day? Actually _promoting_ the use of DIY video as the preferred communication media? That's something you can't do as an small shop. And that's, I think, why you cannot compete. I decided to quit Whatsapp, which in Latinamerica is quite an outrageous move: that application is the communication channel for EVERYTHING: all families, all schools, all neighborhoods. I did it because I think Meta's main metric is actually hostile to their users: they want as much of your time as they can get from you, and they'll use are sorts of psychological weaponry to keep you inside. They were actually vocal about it in the past. There's zero reason to trust them. But why is it that no one has come up with a true alternative (although props to Signal)? Well, there's the network effect, for sure. They also employ very good engineers. But I believe the true reason is scale: it didn't use to be that way, but infrastructure costs are now inmense.
I may be cynical but Zuck saw this happening and entirely shifted to appease current administration. Even having UFC CEO on board. No way they will breakup META.
I dunno, maybe? But you don't even have to be cynical to observe that Mark has a lot of power, and he's an opportunist. I don't think the Repubs trust him, and do you really think that Mark has changed his stripes and doesn't try to cozy up to the next administration if he thinks there's another vibe shift? Also, it feels like that would be quite a scalp for Trump to brag about.
Is it really lost on people that the POTUS owns a competing social network platform?
I just want to be able to message people on Instagram without getting sucked into reels
I feel the spirit of antitrust being for the benefit of consumers has been lost with the recent round of actions. Virtually every action a corporation takes is “anticompetitive” because surely it wants to defeat the competition. That’s the whole point of capitalism. We shouldn’t be concerned until this is actually anti consumer. And it’s hard to prove consumer harm for free products that aren’t really necessary and have many alternatives.
This seems like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yukos lite So much for Zuck's white flags and ring-kissing.
Funny how Wikipedia articles for Russian oligarchs refer to them as "oligarch", but articles for US oligarchs refers to them as "businessman".
I think the illegal monopoly claims are a bit out there given the range of offerings in the social network space. Are they arguing that Instagram specifically is a monopoly in photo-oriented social networking because X is mostly text and YouTube and TikTok is mostly video? I don't see any particular time you can point to where Facebook+Instagram+WhatsApp was a monoopoly in any sort of broad social networking space, especially not the WhatsApp part which competes with iMessage which is an absolute behemoth in terms of market share.
This trial is but a showcase for the berg zucker.
Legal proceedings focused on "social networks" and "browser market shares" and app stores. These are ridiculous, superficial, and meaningless.
If there was really such a thing as a monopoly on social networking, you would have to kick people off the networks, not just stop the companies operating them. What would change if instagram had to become its own company again? The same people would own it. And that is why antitrust is a joke, it does not prevent the true monopoly of who controls what.
I hope Mark issues a public statement that he is dropping his emergency arbitration against her and will allow her book to Publish. I get why he did it, but it didn't work and now it is hurting more than helping. There is no such thing as Bad PR --but an open wound is a different story. (I am on his side in that I don't neurotically hold people accountable for being dbags back in their 20s and early 30s when they aren't that person anymore...google for "brain development at 30" to see why.)
PS: Was at a startup that was wiped out by Instagram 4.3. This was after Mr. SnapEgo reportedly turned down a cool $1B and McAfee's lost son snapped up the technically troubled Vine (that Mr. FootInHisMouth should probably retool and rebrand as "X Prime").
Lots of people behave stupidly in their early 20s, and then grow out of it later in life. But the key is: they have to grow out of it. I'm not convinced this is true of Zuck.
Between his fashion accessories and Joe Rogan appearance, I'm convinced he hasn't. Five years ago, Cheryl Sandberg would call him on it. Today, he's surrounded by yes men.
It's biological https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-47622059 (mankind didn't know this until the relatively recent advent of "live" brain imaging). Something similar happened with SJobs and today people deify him.
Seriously though, Billy was a FB investor (in addition to apparently being a Sith Lord who may have seen an Anakin-echo in youngling Zuck) and it's assumed he didExert influence during the dark period. It must have been intense for Zuck. Can only hope such influence faded with the Epstein scandal, but it's too late for Mark to stay in control of Meta now anyway, unfortunately you have to take the Bad with the Good. Mark's problem now is he's too young to retire and he really, it's not like he can spin-off with Reality Labs and keep going on the Orion stuff --without leadership, that market isLost to Apple now (though Apple's entire C-suite is aging out and since Elon is not available anymore..heh yeah: Zuck, the next CEO of AAPL --halfway callin' it.)
> allow her book to publish
You mean "Careless People?" It looks like it's on Amazon.
https://www.thebookseller.com/news/meta-wins-bid-to-prevent-...
It's very sad. She reported to Congress that she faces a $50K per disparagement penalty. Let's say there are 25 disparagements in the book and it sells 100K copies into the Billion+ FB user community. As she pointed out to Congress, a disparagement is a truth. $5B for telling truths from seven or eight years ago.
She shouldn't have signed the nondisparagement agreement when she had juicy material for a book.
These are usually a severance thing and not a term of employment. Some employers are extra clever and make the contract secret and the arbitration secret, so the public has no idea anything even happened.
Mr. SnapEgo referring to Zuckerberg?
no
[flagged]
So Mark Z's recent $20M "donation" to Trump's presidential library apparently wasn't enough. This would all be much easier for everyone if there was an official rate card and price list.
His payment will work just fine, this is to weed out all the judges that wont follow orders for purging
So there are two things you should always bear in mind about any action taken by the current administration:
1. Everything is for sale. Any laws, tariffs, regulations, etc that negatively affect your interests can be bought off. Pardons can be sold. Thanks for the Supreme Court, there is absolutely nothing illegal about the President doing this anymore; and
2. The courts are used to bend individuals and companies to the policy and personal interests of the president. Take Eric Adams's corruption case. The DoJ wanted to dismiss the case without prejudice so it could be re-filed. This threat of future prosecution was the point to keep Adams in line. The courts saw through this thinly-veiled influence peddling and dismissed the case with prejudice.
So Meta is being forced to kiss the ring. That means silencing content critical of the administration and allowing right-wing conspiracies and hate speech to spread unfettered.
I expect nothing to come of this because these cases all take a decade or more to filter through various appeals, remands back to the trial court, further appeals and so on. But it will absolutely influence how Meta's recommendation algorithms work.
I don't explicitly disagree with anything you wrote, but this action was brought by the Biden administration (technically they re-filed because the judge had thrown the original case out, which was filed during Trump's lame duck period). Half of Trump's support comes from populists, so the FTC has chosen to continue the prosecution.
Lock em up for good. For everyone's sake.
Another scheme of the administration to blackmail a big company into submission. I'm not against sued a big company because of antitrust/monopoly but my fear is that Meta gets off the hook once Zuck jumps through Trump's hoops and sells out the customers to the new dictator.
Zuck waved the white flag, settled the frivolous Trump libel lawsuit, and made several trips to kiss Trump's ring - now he is getting skewered anyhow. Deliciously ironic.
“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”
― Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment.
I wouldn’t write off a leniency due to their aforementioned arse kissing. A trial doesn’t mean a they’ll be found guilty, let alone given any tangible consequences.
In fact, wouldn't a trial where they aren't found guilty would probably be better a better outcome for Zuckerberg than no trial at all?
The DOJ has continued to indicate it intends to require Google spin off Chrome and obviously the tariff game has done no favors to Apple.
Giving Trump money appears to be a game for suckers.
Yeah, for reasons I still don’t understand — probably because it’s driven by Peter Thiel’s Deep Incel Thoughts — JD Vance and co. were big fans of Lina Khan’s FTC antitrust moves during the Biden administration.
The growing hatred for Big Tech is largely bipartisan.
> Fuck them and I hope Trump scewers Zuck
Do you really want to live in a universe where Trump has his hands wrapped around the necks of the media and the press?
What sort of quid-pro-quo do you think he would get in exchange for not squeezing?
If you have any delusions that this can turn out well look at what happened with Eric Adams.
Those who were in prison and paid for a pardon got their money's worth. No take backsies on those. The one grifter was released from paying back millions to the people he defrauded - he made money by paying Trump if looked at as simple arithmetic. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/donald-trump-pardons-ni...
Too bad Joe Exotic doesn't have enough money I guess...
The judge is an Obama appointee and is the same one who ordered Trump to halt illegal deportations to El Salvador. Trump has publicly called for him to be removed. If the administration wanted a lenient ruling, he is the last judge they would rely on.
The judge has less agency than the FTC attorneys, who could easily omit presenting evidence, examining witnesses, etc.
This has been brewing since 2020, trials of this scale take time to build: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Trade_Commission_v._Me....
If anything, he was kissing Trump's ass because he knew it was about to reach trial. The date was known since November.
That's the point. Big tech kissed Trump's arse in the hopes that he would end the antitrust investigations. Meta literally bribed him to do so. Now Trump is just doubling down on them.
He's being blamed for stealing the 2020 election from Trump, so no donations or ring kissing seem to be enough.
https://www.semafor.com/article/04/14/2025/trump-officials-s...
Kind of ironic that Facebook+Cambridge Analytica seem completely forgotten despite being a coordinated, successful effort to push for swings towards Trump.
Roko's Basilisk might be hitting us faster than we thought.
He can just pay his way out of this now, you know that.
If Meta loses then Trump will use selective enforcement for leverage.
This is a civil trial, not criminal. There is no way to find a defendant "guilty".
A recent HN article shows Facebook silenced Pro Palestine posts due to Israeli interference. The issue with Meta controlling so many social media outlets is control over information. A populace that is uninformed will welcome a master (and deserves one), and will look the other way when genocides and injustice take place in our world. The audience of HN is educated and unlikely to fall for misinformation. However, I have seen firsthand how anti-immigrant sentiments, racism and anti-muslim sentiment [1] can prosper when one man controls the flow of information, for they can steer public opinion in ways that are alien to our morals (and favors either their personal politics, their bottom dollar or other nefarious reasons). This is somewhat similar to the Sinclair family running identical stories on many TV stations they control to control narratives. However, Meta has much greater reach. Their role in allowing Russian interference in US elections for ad revenue has largely been forgotten, but Zuck played a role in spreading misinformation and allowing fake users (pretending to be Americans) to steer anger in the population, and allowed a foreign entity to spend their dollars favoring an American candidate (Election meddling). Ultimately, you can argue we must check our sources, but once again, HN is a small bubble. I know firsthand from Meta engineers that Facebook does practically nothing to stop Russian and Iranian threats and is in bed with the Israelis. I hope the FTC comes for their a--
[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
> A populace that is uninformed will welcome a master (and deserves one)
That parenthetical addition is a bit harsh!
Everyone is missing the point: facts don’t matter
What matters is: if Donald Trump wants to break up Meta just for fun, nothing can stop him and he will do it. Just for fun
I wish death to meta.its destroyed whole generation.
> Everyone knew at the time that Facebook bought Instagram because it threatened Facebook's dominance, and hindsight shows that exactly that happened.
This is something that people can claim to know from hindsight. When Facebook acquired it, Instagram was a photo sharing app that had 13 employees.
We have Zuckerberg's emails. No need to claim anything. He said it out loud:
“There are network effects around social products and a finite number of different social mechanics to invent. Once someone wins at a specific mechanic, it’s difficult for others to supplant them without doing something different.”
“One way of looking at this is that what we’re really buying is time. Even if some new competitors springs up, buying Instagram, Path, Foursquare, etc now will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get close to their scale again. Within that time, if we incorporate the social mechanics they were using, those new products won’t get much traction since we’ll already have their mechanics deployed at scale.”
Forty-five minutes later:
“I didn’t mean to imply that we’d be buying them to prevent them from competing with us in any way,”
> “I didn’t mean to imply that we’d be buying them to prevent them from competing with us in any way,”
Isn't what matters in the end is whether there is still an effective market left as a result?
It seems that Mark himself is arguing that by the nature of the network effects of social media, first movers have a natural monopoly advantage that's hard to break.
The regulators should be focusing on that - ie enforcing rules which limit the monopoly advantage due to network effects.
Take the telecomms space - if somebody got first mover on a phone system and it wasn't interoperable with any others - then once established they would have a monopoly. The way you break that is to force interoperability - not allow companies to use access to the network as a competition barrier.
An example in the Meta space - as far as I can tell it was not possible for me to send a message to somebody in Whatsapp without going via whatsapp - ie there is no network access from a different app.
This appears to be exactly what the EU is focussed on - enforcing interop.
https://engineering.fb.com/2024/03/06/security/whatsapp-mess... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Markets_Act
There must’ve been an attorney in that email thread who quickly reached out to him privately to make sure he added another sentence. That’s hilarious.
If it was some insignificant photo sharing app with 13 employees why did they pay a billion dollars for it? Everyone knew when the sale closed exactly what they were doing.
It's fun to see everyone arguing about what "everyone" thought.. when... we can just... look... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817840 is a fun thread from 2012.
The top reply to the top comment has some useful quotes for the purposes of this discussion...
> This is not going to be one of the best tech acquisitions of the next decade.
> Instagram is a photo service in a sea of other photo services.
> Bookmark this comment. See you in 2022.
Heh.
On the other hand the top ten comments as a whole are 3 bullish, 5 neutral, 2 bearish which is certainly not an overwhelming sentiment in any direction. That's despite the fact that bullish comments on start-ups tend to get more votes because it's a start-up community.
Sure, plenty of people thought that it was a good purchase, but my point is nobody thought of it as buying out their competition. The transition into a social media platform and algorithmic content machine occurred under Facebook's direction.
> "Where's the money in Instagram?" Preventing Instagram from developing into something that has a negative effect on Facebook. It's a "keep your enemies closer" move.
- Larrys 2012
Back then Google was trying to be social. Remember Google+?
https://www.joyoftech.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/1523.html
Every time I see a comment accusing HN of having some specific consensual position like a hive mind, I go back and see comments both contradicting and supporting the stance. In other words, different opinions. Every single time I check, and every single time it shows the original commenter engaged in selection bias.
This case is particularly wrong, as that iPod quote is from Slashdot. HN didn’t even exist in 2001.
https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
After trying to set up wireless on my printer interface and enter a password with up and down arrows rotating through an entire set of keys, I'm fairly convinced that no wireless on the iPod was massively correct. If people were expected to set up wifi by entering a password with a rotation device adoption would be miniscule.
Dunno why the internet enjoys dunking so much on a poor anonymous poster who guessed wrong about a product that would catch on, whether that's the iPod, the iPad, Dropbox, etc.
We don't seem to spend half as much energy taking major news outlets to task when they similarly guess wrong, unless we feel that somehow adding a question mark negates any responsibility (i.e. "The Ouya will revolutionize gaming" vs. "Will the Ouya revolutionize gaming?").
It's a recurring cognitive dissonance between cynical tech people and the actual mass market. I mean I'm cynical about most things but the ones that aren't and who get onto the hype train earn big money off of it.
To be fair, the iPod comment was on Slashdot
Fair, but other than browsing the web, a Blackberry was superior for communications than an iPhone back then.
Those people aren't putting in their own money. The people who did put their money into Instagram got to see behind the corporate covers, and they decided to buy anyway. It's very easy to say whether you'd invest $1B if you're not putting in any of your money.
You took "everyone" literally but it's actually like "a lot/majority held the opinion/it was easy to see".
The top comment compares it to YouTube as a great acquisition.
> If it was some insignificant photo sharing app with 13 employees why did they pay a billion dollars for it? Everyone knew when the sale closed exactly what they were doing.
If everyone knew, why was the purchase allowed?
HP bought palm for 1.2 billion dollars and then did nothing with it. Why is doing something anti competitive but doing nothing not? I’m sure there are other examples than the hp/palm situation.
>HP bought palm for 1.2 billion dollars and then did nothing with it. Why is doing something anti competitive but doing nothing not?
Not sure anyone thinks thats true at all.
The conversations at that time were definitely about how Instagram had the heat that Facebook was losing. I felt there was no question that they were neutralizing a competitor.
(WhatsApp only had, like, 50 employees when FB bought it for $19B, as a bit of evidence that headcount isn’t necessarily a measure of value.)
If they bought both Instagram and Snapchat it would have been neutralizing competition. Instagram acquisition was just a business staying relevant after a youth market grew up and soured on them while the next younger ones wanted something else cooler designed for 100% around mobile.
I believe intention and behaviour matters much more to antitrust than simply continuing to be a dominant market leader by smartly staying on top of what the public wants. Google search doing horizontal integration into Android and Chrome to cut off competition's market entry points at lower levels is far more plausible antitrust narrative IMO.
Yes it was between the two if I remember correctly. If they bought both it'd be crossing into near total monopoly, at least before Tiktok took off. But they are pretty far from that now IMO. At least in terms of competition from tons of other services. It's possible they did other shady things outside of that.
We can't claim that _everyone_ knew. But it was obvious to anyone paying attention, and also to all of us who bailed out of facebook as they became more toxic.
The actual simple photo sharing site was Flickr.
Instagram was seen from the start as a SNS with photo sharing as a pretense. The other SNS were already photo centric either way.
Meta doesn't bother me too much.
I'm more concerned with YouTube owning all of social video. Movies are on a dozen streamers. Social stuff is on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, and X. But video essays, independent animation, educational content, cultural critiques, music, video podcasts, trailers, gameplay, research, news - anything long form, serious, interesting - it's all trapped on YouTube as the only distribution platform. And they'll keep getting bigger with no possible alternative due to network effects.
I'm even more concerned with Amazon being a conglomerate [1] that is in online sales, hyperscaler infrastructure, consumer hardware, home automation systems, grocery stores, medicine, primary care, and movie production. And that they can leverage these synergies in grossly unfair ways.
I'm most concerned that the Apple / Google duopoly in mobile, web, and search has entrenched these two players across the vast majority of online transactions, interactions, and computational device usages. They collect margin on everything. They own your devices, they own search, they own the web, they own the apps, they have to be paid off to rank your business, have to be paid off to collect money, they regulate what you can do with your apps and websites, etc. etc. You jump through their hoops. This is their internet.
[1] Especially given the fact that Amazon can subsidize their efforts in these areas from profits in other business units and out-compete viable businesses in those markets. They can offer goods for free with an existing subscription and advertise far and wide across their retail website, plastered on their packaging, and emblazoned on the side of their delivery vehicles. Lord of the Rings got an 80 million dollar advertising package for free, whereas Bong Joon Ho's far more deserving film got next to nothing.
It all bothers me. Centralization is bad. And if Facebook and Google wanted to just disable somebody's channel or pages, they could.
I think everybody on hackernews gets it. We're all pretty much on the same page.
Ain't nobody able to do anything about it though.
Or they just have a different opinion than you. The GP comment was misleading saying there is "no possible" option due to network effects. You absolutely can upload to rumble or floatplane or other sites that have their own networks. People should be praising YouTubes model to pay the channels for content. In an alternate universe, Microsoft is renting you cloud storage by the gb with 3-tier plans and thousands of people use it to share videos with their families.
Laws, content moderation, and moderation obligations had created an insurmountable barrier to entry to fix that. Though abolishing those hard and soft laws can't be a solution for various reasons.
Meta's stuff gets a lot of attention because it's flashy and tied to social media drama, but the structural power of Amazon, YouTube, Apple, and Google is way scarier long-term. They're not just dominating products - they're controlling infrastructure. Distribution, discovery, monetization - the whole stack.
What’s surprising to me about the dominance of YouTube is the fact that 1) unlike all the social networks there is very little network effect with YouTube, and 2) there are perfectly to viable alternatively such as Vimeo that are routinely bypassed.
> I'm more concerned with YouTube owning all of social video. Movies are on a dozen streamers. Social stuff is on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, and X. But video essays, independent animation, educational content, cultural critiques, music, video podcasts, trailers, gameplay, research, news - anything long form, serious, interesting - it's all trapped on YouTube as the only distribution platform. And they'll keep getting bigger with no possible alternative due to network effects.
Yes, but: despite all of us adblocking them, this is all supported by their ad revenue.
The discovery effect is simply too powerful. I can't really see a way out of this because people are not going to go back to paying for media. Possibly the only way is something like the increasing control of social media from the EU forcing a separate EU Youtube, which might include things like the French TV rules forcing a certain amount of content to be in French, plus control over foreign disinformation influencers.
(you know what the only other social video platforms are with millions of users? Bilibili, xiaohungshu etc.)
"Meta doesn't bother me too much."
it is concern for someone outside western hemisphere, in Asia especially META dominance is even stronger
Facebook was leveraging Onavo at the time to understand growth trends in competitors. They 100% acquired Instagram and WhatsApp because their growth trends posed threats to the Blue app.
> When Facebook acquired it, Instagram was a photo sharing app that had 13 employees.
Sure, but it was a serious threat to Facebook with hordes of especially younger people moving away from FB in favor of more activity on Instagram, which at that time had evolved from "just" a photo making/sharing app to a social network.
No. Mobile Camera Apps were a threat to non mobile first facebook. ("Instagram is a photo service in a sea of other photo services.")
Any one of them could have taken off and eaten facebook's lunch. Instagram was the winner in a sea of camera apps because facebook threw unlimited resources into the hip app of the moment.
> When Facebook acquired it, Instagram was a photo sharing app that had 13 employees.
And growing quickly, so:
> In his opening remarks, Mr. Matheson mentioned documents, including what he described as a “smoking gun” February 2012 email in which Mr. Zuckerberg discussed the rise of Instagram and the importance of “neutralizing a potential competitor.” In another email, in November 2012 to Ms. Sandberg, the chief operating officer at the time, Mr. Zuckerberg wrote, “Messenger isn’t beating WhatsApp, Instagram was growing so much faster than us that we had to buy them for $1 billion.”
> The F.T.C. showed Mr. Zuckerberg a 2011 email in which he wrote, “We really need to get our act together quickly on this since Instagram is growing so fast.”
* https://archive.is/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/techno...
> It’s a combination of neutralizing a competitor and improving Facebook, Zuckerberg said in a reply. “There are network effects around social products and a finite number of different social mechanics to invent. Once someone wins at a specific mechanic, it’s difficult for others to supplant them without doing something different.”
> Zuckerberg continued: “One way of looking at this is that what we’re really buying is time. Even if some new competitors springs up, buying Instagram, Path, Foursquare, etc now will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get close to their scale again. Within that time, if we incorporate the social mechanics they were using, those new products won’t get much traction since we’ll already have their mechanics deployed at scale.”
> Forty-five minutes later, Zuckerberg sent a carefully worded clarification to his earlier, looser remarks.
> “I didn’t mean to imply that we’d be buying them to prevent them from competing with us in any way,” he wrote.
* https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/29/21345723/facebook-instagr...
And Whatsapp still has a small team. It has no bearing on the fact that it is more widespread form of communication than text/call/email etc. all over the world under the control of one evil megacorp.
But it was at 30m users, post inflection point wrt its hockey stick
Facebook knew what it was doing and the emails plainly reflect that
In the end it doesn’t matter. It matters what Zuckerberg thought.
They're also directly behind some of the anti-TikTok push; again, trying to kneecap their competition.
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/report-facebook-hi...
Over the last ~3 years I've been passively following the negative PR campaign against TT by Meta; a lot of the outrage felt a bit manufactured, specifically the outlandish claims like the 'slap a teacher challenge' which, upon investigation, didn't actually exist [0]
[0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/slap-a-teacher-tiktok-challe...
https://archive.ph/ERLFo - Facebook paid Targeted Victory, a PR firm, to malign TikTok
https://archive.ph/wYuvL - A whistleblower’s power: Key takeaways from the Facebook Papers
https://archive.ph/rWDA4 - Mark Zuckerberg says TikTok is a threat to democracy, but didn't say he spent 6 months trying to buy its predecessor
https://archive.ph/H8SIk - Before Mark Zuckerberg Tried To Kill TikTok, He Wanted To Own It
https://archive.ph/liFKi - FACEBOOK’S PLAYBOOK TO BEAT COMPETITORS HAS HAD TO CHANGE WITH TIKTOK
https://archive.ph/9XSqi - Facebook Tries to Take Down TikTok
https://archive.ph/LWTHf - Reuters: Factbox: Facebook and TikTok's fraught history - quick look
https://archive.ph/H3dfJ - Facebook Parent Company Defends Its PR Campaign to Portray TikTok as Threat to American Children
Plus they tried to buy other companies that they thought posed a threat (snap, etc?)
If everyone indeed "knew at the time" then why did the FTC allow the acquisition to go through in a 5-0 vote?
The government just kinda forgot that competition law existed for a few decades.
They were busy doing things like bringing freedom and democracy to Afghanistan, having a financial crisis, stuff like that. Very important stuff. Social media? Oh yes I think my grandson told me about that.
I didn't know the FTC got involved in Afghanistan
FTC does what the public opinion expects them to do.
This is what I don't get, the FTC is suing because the FTC allowed something to happen, when the platforms had even more dominance than they do now?
Kind of stinks of less than valid motivations based on the timing of bringing this up over a decade after the fact.
At the time, Instagram had 80 million users, it had no monetization strategy and was profitless[1]. I suppose this made it seem less of an immediate competitive threat to Facebook's business model, especially with the presence of other smaller photo sharing platforms by Google etc.
In 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported that FTC officials in 2012 had concerns about the deal raising antitrust issues. However, they were apprehensive about potentially losing an antitrust case in court if they sued to block the deal.[2] If they would lose then on the merits of trying to enforce the Clayton Act, it would set a precedent that likely could not be undone.
[1] https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/facebook-instagram-deal-down-747m-...
[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/tech-ceos-defend-operations-ahe...
Onavo, the VPN app-company that was repurposed by facebook for market intelligence, was only acquired in 2013, Instagram was acquired a year earlier in 2012.
But before 2013 there were methods on both iOS and Android for an App to get a list of all OTHER installed apps on the device.
Facebook had the means to know exactly at which rate each app was growing and how many of the users they have to share with it, the facebook app itself was gathering this info.
They could gather enough data to even calculate how much user-attention they lose after each app is installed on a users' device.
--
Onavo was then acquired in 2013, right when Apple started to lock-down those app-scanning methods with iOS7.
So it appears that the company was acquired to be able to KEEP doing something they have already been doing before that with the facebook app.
Onavo was the vpn app turned competitive intelligence tool
I can personally confirm that story.
Something being predicted poorly, hypothetically, doesn’t mean you can’t rectify a past mistake, right?
Not specifically related to this case, necessarily, but if you let an acquisition go through and discover a decade later that it was, in fact, anticompetitive (and intentionally so), presumably you would still try to break up the resulting monopoly, even if you didn’t predict it would happen?
Take a look at the Alcoa case from 1945 [0]. The courts ruled that Alcoa was an illegal monopoly even though it acquired that status legally.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Alcoa
if you plan to steal something and get caught, you are guilty of planning to steal something, but you are not guilty of stealing it.
if you impulsively steal something and get caught, you are not guilty of planning to steal something, but you are guilty of stealing it.
monopoly is the same.
I guess theZuck didn't donate enough to the campaign
> I need the trial to go through and acquit me, because it guarantees me against future trials
On substantially identical charges, where the principle of double jeopardy holds sway.
Wasn't the FTC completely rebooted in 2021?
That explains changes in priorities, but it does not make for great jurisprudence to have their unanimous decision revoked.
They could argue that the decision was made based on declarations that did not align with the private conversation that Zuckerberg had at the time, as those emails came out since.
I think "everyone" in this case means: people who knew the business and had an adversarial perception of Facebook's intentions. This was apparently not how the FTC thought at the time.
Hell, even I wasn't this cynical back in those days. I was shocked as late as 2018 when Facebook began using SMS phone numbers for advertising, something they'd promised not to do (for obvious reasons.) https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-said-to-use-peoples-ph...
I've never had a Facebook account, other than a burner for the brief time I spent investigating VR via Oculus Quest 2.
I almost had one once, some time in the very early 2010s. After first login, the first prompt I saw was for my email account's authentication details, so that Facebook could "find my contacts for me."
I forget the exact language they used, but I know a boundary test when I see one, and I completed neither that nor any other further onboarding step, but immediately "deleted" the account - understanding this would not actually remove any information, but would deny me at least the temptation to develop what I could see would become a dangerous habit.
I don't exactly think I blame people who were slower to catch on, which is a relief, considering that appears at one time or another to have been about half the species and it would be a lot of work. But I would incline much less to say that mistrusting Facebook as early as 2018 would have been cynical, than that still to have trusted them so late seems remarkably naïve.
A move being anti-competitive and it being against anti-trust law are not the same thing. You also need to establish that the defendant is improperly exercising their own size/market-power to force the deal through which is a much higher bar.
Also the FTC is not exactly known for enforcing antitrust law very strictly.
I tried to answer that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43686919
The combination of neoliberal laissez-faire economics along with how strongly tech supported President Obama's campaigns meant that the industry got to run amok for a decade. It's easily one of the biggest stains on his presidency in hindsight.
Partly our regulatory system unfortunately was timid and defanged and philosophically approving of a lot of mergers in general (neoliberalism + Laissez Fair Conservatives). The FTC didn't do the discovery to get the smoking gun email of Zuckerburg saying how he was doing the buyout specifically to "neutralize a potential competitor," (as The New York Times reported).
To anyone on the side of anti-trust, it was clear even without that email as to how much Instagram and WhatsApp were growing, and thus Facebook was Standard Oiling.
This implies that every horizontal acquisition is anti-competitive, does it not? If not I would love to read why not.
If there are 7 different grocery stores in driving distance of my house and two of them merge, I've still got a choice of 6 stores so there's still reasonable competition.
If there are 3 different grocery stores and two of them merge, though? That's a different matter.
And if 1 of the remaining 2 is the zero-waste organic store that only rich people and hippies use? It might not even be providing all that much competition.
Yeah, but we're talking about 2012. Instagram was small and wasn't making any money, and feature-wise it barely resembled what it is today. Going just by US sites in 2012 Twitter, Tumblr, Snapchat, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube, and Reddit were all large competing social networks (or social network adjacent sites/apps).
Seems like in your analogy there were plenty of grocery stores left.
They did, apparently since 2016.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/29/facebook-project-atlas/
That's because it was still an iOS-exclusive.
People forget that the Android app and the aquisition announcement came out like one week apart. The basic web version didn't come out until half a year later.
My point is it already had a solid rich, influencer-y userbase + was about to become available on more platforms. Aquisition definitely had an impact on the user growth, but the growth itself was already inevitable.
There are far, far, far more than just 7 photo sharing apps/websites within the same number of clicks as Facebook and Instagram.
The thing that makes something a competitor is the ability to act as a substitute. That means grocery stores that are 1000 miles away don't count. For photo sharing, what makes something a viable substitute is having a sufficient network effect, so photo sharing services with hundreds of users aren't a substitute for ones with millions.
This implies that mergers between large services that have a network effect should always be prohibited, but why is that even a problem unless your goal is to thwart competition?
It would also create a useful incentive: Federated systems (like email) have a single network that spans entities. If Microsoft wants to buy Hotmail, they're not buying a separate network so you don't have to be worried about it even if they each have 25 million users as long as that's not too large a percentage of the billion people who use email. So then companies would want to participate in federated systems instead of creating silos like modern social networks do, because then they would be as strictly prohibited from doing mergers.
There weren’t only 3 social networks and they are not impossible to replicate (like cellular networks with limited spectrum).
Yes, every horizontal acquisition is anti-competitive.
Antitrust violations are a higher bar, you must improperly flex your dominant market position to violate the law. For that the government would have to show that FB offered an unreasonable price that nobody sane would match or that they threatened to cut off Insta links from FB if they didn't sell, something like that.
Not always. Say you have 4 cell phone carriers. 2 clearly on top and 2 far behind. The two weak ones merging would, on paper, take you from 4 companies to 3. In reality you go from 2 options to 3.
So I have an alternative take on this. I don't agree with your basic facts but I have a different conclusion.
If a company, which had 13 employees at the time of acquisition and was ~2 years old, can be a legitimate threat to Facebook (which it was), then how strong is your monopoly, really?
For context, we've seen this play out multiple times in the last decade: with Snapchat to some degree but now, more importantly, with Tiktok.
Many consider Facebook a relic for old people. IG is rapidly meeting the same fate. It seems to be way more popular with millenials than Zoomers (anecdotally).
My point is that when the cost of user switching to a new platform is as simple as downloading a new app and creating a new login, then your "monopoly" lacks the traditional moat or barrier to entry that antitrust is specifically designed to fight.
Put another way: this just isn't as urgent as people are making it out to be and (IMHO) it's merely a shakedown by the current administration to get Meta to fall in line with censoring topics that the administration doesn't like.
Can you show me something from that time that shows this was the dominate sentiment? Because I remember everyone laughing the Facebook would pay so much for such a simple app.
here's a Techcrunch article from the time: https://techcrunch.com/2012/04/09/facebook-to-acquire-instag...
> Last year, documents for a standalone Facebook mobile photo sharing app were attained by TechCrunch. Now it seems Facebook would rather buy Instagram which comes with a built-in community of photographers and photo lovers, while simultaneously squashing a threat to its dominance in photo sharing.
Sherman Antitrust Act fits on a single sheet of paper. Does the statute say anything about the sentiments of the blogs you read?
Anti competitive how though? It helped them, and facebook helped instagram, but where is the monopoly?
Collusion helps all involved parties but is anti competitive since companies should compete not cooperate.
? Meta owning Instagram and Facebook is the monopoly. Owning things that BILLIONS AND BILLIONS of users use because you want to own them and control them so others don't, that's the monopoly.
Innovation can't happen without Facebook's say-so, that's the monopoly, and over way too many people.
It was a tiny 1 billion dollar acquisition of a company with less than 50 employees. If everyone knew at the time how dominant Instagram would become, that "everyone" sure didn't include the founders and investors in Instagram.
Facebook, wary of someone doing to them what they did to MySpace, was going around buying anyone who might be the next thing. It wasn't necessarily clear that Insta would blow up in the way it did but it was clear that was Facebook's motivation for buying.
Also "tiny 1 billion dollar acquisition" is not how I'd characterize what was the largest acquisition FB had made up to that point: https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/04/09/...
> Though Facebook is known for smaller acquisitions, Instagram’s surging momentum likely compelled the social network to swiftly put together a billion-dollar offer.
Mira just raised $2B for her company pre-revenue and pre-product.
Meta revenue also went up 15x (actually maybe more?). So implying the valuation has not risen
Meta's position is much better, they own Insta and Whatsapp now! Diversification!
Google rise makes less sense but their position as king of search seems even more concrete than ever before (although LLMs might threaten that if they don't stay competitive I guess).
$1B in 2012 is $1.4B in 2025.
Source: https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/2012?amount=10000...
Back in the day, Android allowed any app to see what other apps were installed. That's how Facebook saw the threat from Instagram so early.
Actually Instagram was iOS only at the announced time of acquisition. It was a pretty big bet at the time and almost no one believed it was worth $1B.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43518866
Some context for those interested:
https://www.techemails.com/p/mark-zuckerberg-instagram-fours...
You know who else knew how many devices Instagram was on? Instagram. And yet they were willing to sell. There is no conspiracy here. There is nothing nefarious. Facebook made a good bet.
Correct me if I'm wrong but as far as I know Facebook (and probably also Instagram) degrades photo quality by a lot, something Flickr doesn't do
That plus scary TOS changes Instagram did immediately after acquisition
There is also the question of cause and effect. Did Instagram grow to what it is today because of a decade of investments from Meta?
Facebook knew. They have the data by spying on everything
They knew photos tracked better in news feeds
Also they new users don’t like to switch and get new followers
See Bluesky now. Hard to move even 1000 followers
This is a joke, everyone made fun of FB paying 1 BILLION dollars for Instagram, they didn't even have an android app at the time.
From an actual email from Mark Zuckerberg on February 28th 2012:
> Integrating their products with ours to improve the service is also a factor. But in reality, we already know these companies’ social mechanics, and we will integrate them over the next 12–24 months anyway. The integration plan involves building their mechanics into our products rather than directly integrating their products, if that makes sense, by a combination of these two things: neutralizing a potential competitor, integrating their products with ours to improve the service.
> One way of looking at this is that what we’re really buying is time. Even if some new competitor springs up buying Instagram, Path, Foursquare, et cetera, now will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get close to their scale again. Within that time, if we incorporate the social mechanics they are using, those new products won’t get much traction because we will already have their mechanics deployed at scale.
https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/meta
The government is claiming that Facebook bought Meta and Whatsapp because it couldn't compete with them.
Is that illegal? I don't understand! Every company that buys another company buys it because it adds something to their business. It's a ridiculous claim.
It’s an argument for how to break up the company not just a complaint about what happened. Companies that buy a supplier or customer frequently didn’t compete with that supplier so breaking them off wouldn’t break up the monopoly.
Whatsapp was purchased as a competition and therefore there’s a solid case for spitting the company along that line. Split off Instagram and things look even more competitive.
> Every company that buys another company buys it because it adds something to their business.
The point is that they didn't acquire those companies to add to their business, they acquired them because their continued independent existence detracted from their business. Also known as competition.
What are you basing that on? Instagram is clearly their preferred app at least in the US. It definitely bolstered their business. And they obviously invested heavily into it post acquisition.
I dislike meta but wouldnt call their ownership of instagram anti competitive monopolistic.
Yes, trying to beat your competition by buying them is incredibly illegal and should be illegal. If you have 70% of a market and an up-and-comer is now at 25% but growing, a market leader purchasing their competitor to maintain their market position is an anti-competitive move and why we don't and shouldn't allow every single horizontal or vertical or conglomerate merger.
>it because it adds something to their business. It's a ridiculous claim.
"It" and "Something" are incredibly vague and meaningless. Their vacuousness is what allows you to not understand the illegal behavior.
>, trying to beat your competition by buying them is incredibly illegal
If you weren't aware, it's actually legal to buy a competitor. It just has to pass antitrust review.
E.g. In 2006, the government approved Google acquisition of Youtube which competed with Google Video: https://www.google.com/search?q=google+2006+acquisition+yout...
Companies buy/merge competitors all the time that passes FTC legal review. E.g. Boeing acquired competitor McDonnell Douglas. Hewlett-Packard acquired Compaq Computer.
And sometimes US government encourages mergers. E.g. US asks stronger bank buy a weaker competitor bank. It's been leaked that the US Govt is encouraging competitors Intel and AMD to merge ... so the USA semiconductor industry can be stronger and thus, less dependent on Taiwan TSMC and stay ahead of China.
https://www.google.com/search?q=us+government+encouraging+in...
> Companies buy/merge competitors all the time that passes FTC legal review. E.g. Boeing acquired competitor McDonnell Douglas. Hewlett-Packard acquired Compaq Computer.
These are mergers that were allowed, but probably shouldn't have been because their industries were already quite consolidated by that point.
The ones that should be okay is when e.g. a company with 4% market share wants to buy a company with 0.5% market share. Companies merging when they each already have double digit percentages of the market is craziness.
> It's been leaked that the US Govt is encouraging competitors Intel and AMD to merge ... so the USA semiconductor industry can be stronger and thus, less dependent on Taiwan TSMC and stay ahead of China.
This sort of thinking is a demonstration of incompetence. AMD and Intel can both design competitive processors. AMD sold their fabs and now has the processors made by TSMC. Intel still makes them but their manufacturing process has fallen behind, to the point that they too have used TSMC to make some of their products. Saddling AMD with Intel's uncompetitive process would only put them both at a disadvantage against other competitors using TSMC.
The real problem here is that Intel was too vertically integrated and focused on producing only its own designs on its fabs, and then abandoned the low end of the market to sustain its margins. Which allowed TSMC to capture enough market share that the larger volume gave them enough capital to take the lead.
What the US needs is not mergers but the opposite -- its own TSMC as a competitive contract fab that can do the volumes needed to sustain a state of the art process.
> The government is claiming that Facebook bought Meta and Whatsapp because it couldn't compete with them.
s/Meta/Instagram/
We're spending a lot of effort discussing what we thought in 2012, when the acquisition on the surface seemed insane ($1B!! For a photo app!)
What is more significant is what Meta did since then.
I do think Meta didn't see simply a photo sharing app, they saw another social graph they could ingest. They did this quite successfully.
It always cracks me up when Meta trots out the "but look, there's competition now!" argument like that somehow erases the intent behind those acquisitions
Ironic because every 17 year old “at the time” was ditching Facebook and on instagram
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I'm guessing that there's just a younger audience, now. We'd just been off the back of two decades of MS buying everything it got near, it was just what the done thing was. Instagram was taking serious oxygen away from facebook at the time; the buyout wasn't so much an "everyone knows it" but almost an inevitability.
Id partially agree. The historical case that time erased is that early app store, apps were exploding and disappearing just as quickly and the eventual "zero-risk" on network apps was enormous at the time. Everyone agreed with the trajectory, but no one had consensus on the permanence.
Now the real thing that has to be seen is whether Mark Zuckerberg is "masculine" enough to escape from "the matrix".