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Comment by graeme | Hacker News Reader

> conditioning access to a product or service in which a firm has market power to the use of a separate product or service is anticompetitive

Is the house committee arguing Facebook is a monopoly in....VR? From the stats I found Oculus has a 20-30% share.

I don’t like the Facebook requirement for Oculus, but not everything I don’t lime constitutes a monopoly.

Other have commented that the house assumes what it sets out to prove. You’d first have to show market power to make this kind of analysis.

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The complaint does not require a monopoly on either side. It formalizes the reason you don't like the FB login requirement.

It is abuse of market power on both sides of the FB/Oculus coin to enforce use of their ecosystem. The market power of FB is obvious, so even if they are using it only to drive a few more ppl to create FB accts by buying Oculus, it is an abuse. Doesn't require Oculus to have much power.

Considering FB & Zuckerberg's long history of abusing privacy, predating even Facebook back to Facemash (which scraped Harvard students' photos from an online directory and set students to rank for hotness), and then Zuck either saying "sorry" or attempting to rewrite history, it seems the House is on the right track here.

That seems absurd! You can't use Alexa without Amazon, Chromecast without Google, iWatch without Apple. Why can't Facebook make a headset that requires Facebook?

Here is the analogy. A Google account is like a costco membership. You sign up for it but just the membership alone doesn't do much. To benefit you have to go to costco and explicitly choose which products you want to buy and use. If you want to use Google search you're not forced to use Google Docs.

A Facebook account is a product in its own right. It is essentially what would be sitting on costco's shelves. Imagine if you buy a console and then during account signup you were asked to buy a bag of doritos and enter the code inside the dorito bag. That's what Facebook is doing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)

> Is the house committee arguing Facebook is a monopoly

I believe the phrase right there in the quote you made is "Market power". Being a monopoly is not a requirement for antitrust violations.

I’m not american, and mispoke. But if you switch out monopoly for market power, I’m not sure it changes the comment. It’s not obvious facebook has inordinate market power in vr.

Which standalone VR headset would you recommend, if one can‘t use a Facebook login?

"Standalone" is a nice feature but not a separate product category. Facebook rightly considers Sony, Microsoft, HTC as competing with Oculus.

Standalone absolutely is a separate product cateogory. It's the difference between a computer monitor and an iPad: even though they both have screens, they are different in kind. They target different market segments, have completely different software ecosystems both for end-users and developers, orders of magnitude more R&D requirements, higher switching costs, etc.

It's the difference between a smart TV and a dumb TV. They have different guts but the market is the same.

Major titles like Beat Saber or Half Life Alyx can be played on either standalone or tethered headsets. Facebook offers both under the Oculus brand and positions them together: https://www.oculus.com/compare/

Rift S is discontinued, their marketing materials notwitstanding. Half Life Alyx can only be played by a standalone headset if you let a computer run the all the graphics and game logic, similar to how an iPad can be used as a second monitor for Apple devices. It's really quite different from smart/dumb TV.

It's the same. The market is VR gaming. People who want to play VR games choose what headset to buy. Simple as that.

The TV/iPad comparison doesn't work. It's very common to have both a TV and an iPad, but I have yet to meet anyone who has both tethered and untethered VR headsets, and thinks of them as distinct.

The VR market is small and may differentiate in time, like how "mobile" has grown so it's common to have a phone and tablet and laptop. Bringing down the antitrust hammer today seems so premature.

You can make a TV smart for $30. The difference between standalone and tethered headsets is a wide gulf.

But you bought "a TV". Likewise you buy "a VR headset."

TVs all have basically the same capabilities, or you can fix that for a very small amount of money.

VR Headsets don't share that quality, with wired vs. standalone.

An analogy would be having exactly one manufacturer that makes 3D TVs. They have market dominance there; it's not just "a TV".

It's the difference between buying a display and a portable VR console.

That's like saying laptops are not a separate product category from desktops... Whatever Sony, Microsoft or HTC are providing is just a display. Oculus Quest is a portable VR console.

I personaly use an HTC Vive and haven't had any trouble with it.

Having owned both the original Rift and a Rift-S, and having also tested the original Vive a few times, I wouldn't recommend any headset with such a low resolution.

The difference between 1st- and 2nd-gen headsets (Valve Index, Vive Pro, Rift S) feels like the difference between a 800x600 display and a 1080p display.

I agree they could have formulated this in a better way.

But in the end, I believe this ruling is all about restricting data gathering from Big Tech as much as possible and I also believe that's a good thing.

Learn the difference between ‘monopoly’ and other aspects of the antitrust laws in general (like ‘tying’) perhaps, before commenting

For tying to matter, don’t you need some sort of market dominance? Facebook doesn’t have that in VR. I think you could switch market power for monopoly in my comment and it would have the same meaning: Oculus doesn’t dominate VR.

Your comment sounds smart but provides no information and isn’t obviously correct.

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