Justin Osofsky (Facebook vice president):
"Twitter launched Vine today which lets you shoot multiple short video segments to make one single, 6-second video... Unless anyone raises objections, we will shut down their friends API access today. We've prepared reactive PR, and I will let Jana know our decision."
Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook chief executive):
"Yup, go for it."
"Hey, don't leave a papertrail about 'crushing' or 'destroying' competitors. We do not seek to monopolize markets and run afoul of antitrust laws. Instead, talk about how your product can better satisfy users and meet a demand."
(Another common theme I remember was that you shouldn't route stuff through Switzerland to get around export controls.)
[1] I contracted there via a startup.
Sketchy stuff comes up on a list? "Let's take it offline", not "no, stop this now".
That kind of thing. It was systemic.
The implication was "don't do anticompetitive behavior, we don't need to", but the warnings were given.
Shutting this down is just good management.
Not that it makes Google's actions any better. But nowadays I doubt every single self proclaimed independent entity.
These people should be in a cell.
The camera a detective I know was issued was a Canon Elph from 2003. They all use personal smartphones because the institutional equipment is limited and junky.
Corporations have already maxed out their capacity in terms of production efficiency; it's just really hard for them to coordinate so many employees efficiently. If coordinating large numbers of people was easy (and didn't become exponentially harder relative to number of people), we'd probably all be wealthy communists.
Instead of focusing on how to do their own job better, corporations have shifted their focus towards how to make it harder for competitors to do theirs.
Vine was launched in January 2013. Back then FB and Twitter were significantly more competitive than they are now.
Twitter must have been terrifying to Facebook. Of course they would shut down their API access for Vine. It's a no brainer.
The point of building a platform is to create more value for your users, your partners, and your own business. Not to make it easier for your competition to catch up...
Imagine if Microsoft just came along one day and literally banned any office software, including LibreOffice etc. from running on it's OSs.
Imagine if Nissan bought up a bunch of gas chains in the US and refused to sell gas to ... to let's say ... GM cars.
Or the electric company, which had invested in some solar panel outlays, decided to ban all other 3rd party solar panels from the grid.
These things are always a little fuzzy, but they are real.
Also - the lack of user clear consent is another one ie telling users that apps 'cannot extract their data' but in reality, they are selling it to Netflix.
FB can legitimately explain a way a lot of issues lately, but this one is bad. I think it's far worse than the Cambridge Analytica scandal in which case they weren't really doing anything wrong, just late to maybe close off said APIs.
A free online service running on hardware you don't control isn't obligated to provide free service for everyone indefinitely. Same as "No shirt, no shoes, no service". A proprietor can refuse dealings with toxic customers.
- "No shirt, no shoes, no service" is a rule that applies to all customers, same with blocking customers that develop toxic behavior.
- Specifically targeting and dropping service for someone who launched a different competing service, for that reason, is anti-competitive.
The example I'm thinking of is Microsoft with Internet Explorer, where users were unable to use a browser of their choice. Here a company is not being allowed to use an API, but users are not prevented from using the product if they'd like. They just won't get all the functionality of Facebook within that company's product.
Facebook's behavior seems more comparable to Apple disallowing use of privileged iOS APIs in competing mobile browsers rather than Microsoft not allowing users to install competing browsers. But I'm not an expert on monopolies, so I'm happy to be corrected here.
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1. NB - I'm not making a claim or observation about ethics or what ought to be, I'm asking about what is, legally.
I'd gather that the same might apply to sale/no sale and not just prices, i.e. you can't not sell something to someone purely for competitive reasons, there has to be 'some reason'.
[1] https://definitions.uslegal.com/p/price-discrimination/
Full disclosure: I'm definitely not a lawyer.
So that's not a good example.
We're talking about a store arbitrarily discriminating between customers on terms of it's own choosing.
... which is what makes it harder.
As for your 'software sold after the fact' ... welcome to iOS / AppStore to see who 'controls' what :)
First of all, let's see the facts.
- Sharing user's friendship data with all applications was wrong decision. There were a lot of bad actors. - So Facebook decided to stop this practice. But in the process some good actors are also burned, so they implemented some system to share some limited data considering:
- You have some critical mass of users - sign a special agreement to promise you will not use this data in a bad way - if having not access to this friendship data breaking your app's model - and probably your app is not competing with facebook's business model
so twitter came, agreed on this terms, got whitelisted. Then probably stepped over fb's toe with vine, and facebook revoked their access.
The thing is facebook didn't remove because it was competitive, they didn't allow competitive in the first place. This is not different from Apple not allowing another browser engines, or another app stores in their ecosystem.
It was not an open, rules-based scenario.
For example, there's no reason that 'Vine' did anything to breach the 'good actor' scenario - FB banned them for competitive reasons.
'Bumble' got special access because FB is an investor. (Did OkCupid? Tinder?)
Moroever, it seems that users were not properly notified of the 'good actors use' of their data.
The key point is 'equitable value exchange'.
If I am building a social network, leaching user/data from facebook, it is different than creating an app inside facebook ecosystem. This is the main distinction I guess.
I think you misread the article. Facebook wasn't an investor in Bumble. Badoo was an investor in Bumble along with owning other dating services which were whitelisted. Facebook was also not (that I can find online) an investor in Badoo.
It's one of the reasons Amazon won't admit to dropping AppleTV and Chromecast from their entire store because the products compete with their Firestick. Instead Amazon says that users are confused when trying to buy their firestick, so they're blocking even the third party sellers from listing it. Note that Amazon allows thousands of competing goods to sell in their store that users can equally get confused about.
Facebook kind of screwed up here, since the EU/UK does not require a company to be market-dominant to be eligible for anti-competitive fines.
Sure, from a competitive perspective, that makes perfect sense. However, FB is at this point a global surveillance operation aimed at inserting itself as an essential utility in everyone's life, with the only apparent limit on their intel collection being fear of bad PR.
If you don't have enough sense to stop playing chicken with gray-areas[1] when you're big enough that playing rough can hurt those outside of the game, then you deserve to be regulated, if not attacked by regulators and sued until it really, seriously hurts, maybe kills.
I mean, what do you call it when a tech company puts serious energy and effort into hiding that they're harvesting text messages and phone calls from Android users incautious enough to trust them? Facebook is the world's largest malware infestation to date.
[1] To be exceedingly generous to a firm as slimy and invasive as FB.
When real monopolies exist and are dangerous, we need to be able to tell them apart.
Facebook is still far from the textbook definition of monopoly, but this anti-competitive behavior is not good.
acting with the knowledge that they can stem the growth of a competitor and flipping the switch
Although if it is or not a monopoly and an abuse of market power is dubious, but it clearly is anti-competitive.
This is similar to Amazon shutting off Google Products from any retailers using its platform. It is anti-competitive, but the jury is out on whether it is abusing market power.
TL;DR: you can try to shut off your competitors from the market, as long as you're not abusing your market power to do so.
PS: The Hacker News definition of monopoly has nothing to do with the economics, policy and antitrust definition of monopoly.
But taking anti-competitive actions by itself isn't necessarily an issue, but it is a problem if you're deemed to have significant market power in a defined market.
Essentially: if Facebook is deemed to have significant market power, this could be a problem, if it doesn't have, then it isn't a problem.
Anti-trust relies heavily on the precise definition of a market (which is a subject that Hacker News comments generally ignore when crying wolf, I mean, monopoly).
Removing the access of a competitor in retaliation for them competing with you, when you give it to other players is anti-competitive by definition.
(Source: https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/26/3189340/twitter-blocks-in...)
The data collection and selling --that's what people should be upset about and lobby against. This kind of thing is a sideshow and will only interest the most hard-core anti-FB people. To get regular folks on board with changing the culture around user data, talk about user data and privacy, concentrate on that.