There’s over a hundred and twenty years of antitrust enforcement in this country. Why does HN insist on reinventing antitrust law from their own intuition about what “anti-competitive” means?
Both platforms charge other businesses to advertise, because of the limited options businesses have to advertise they can charge high prices.
Those advertising costs get passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices on products.
We need to look beyond the "Price = 0" narrative when we're investigating things that in this new era are free.
Facebook used to only have text, and people linked to pictures on (mostly) Flickr. And then MZ realized 80% of Facebook posts Link to pictures on outside websites. That’s competition for ad placement; so FB added picture storage, albums, etc. same with Videos.
The customers, advertisers, previously had Flickr as an option. Now they don’t. That’s not a coincidence. And that’s not even illegal on FB’s part as long as they aren’t a monopoly - but now they are.
Unless you have inside knowledge about Instagram’s business plans, it is reasonable to assume they would have had ads sooner or later, as no other monetization scheme seems sustainable for this kind of “product”.
The nipping of competition in the bud does not make it any less anti competitive.
"Consumers" on Facebook are ad buyers, not users. Prices aren't 0 - Facebook's revenue was $70bn in 2019. That comes from businesses buy ads. Everything Facebook does to dominate the social media space is about selling more ads for more money. That's why they buy competitors, shut down rivals, and aggressively do what they can to drive prices for the ads on their platforms up.