Key line:
> The FTC is seeking a permanent injunction in federal court that could, among other things: require divestitures of assets, including Instagram and WhatsApp
> The FTC is seeking a permanent injunction in federal court that could, among other things: require divestitures of assets, including Instagram and WhatsApp
I know it's a pipe dream, but an independent Oculus would make me so happy. I suspect this is impossible due to the early nature of the VR market. Maybe just an FTC requirement _not_ to require a FB login?
It appears VR is still too small of a market for them to care about.
1) VR ever becoming a huge player. It might. It might not. Right now there's no real evidence that VR will actually become a big deal, and Facebook could argue that this is a niche offering that can't be anti-competitive because there's no real market yet.
2) The feasibility of VR technology independent of major vendors. There's a strong possibility that without a huge R&D budget VR will never overcome the hurdles that might keep it out of the mainstream. Facebook could argue that removing Oculus would doom VR to failure in the market.
3) The Sirus/XM merger removed 100% of satellite radio competition (there's only one vendor left after the merger), but both Sirius and XM successfully argued that the market isn't big enough to support multiple vendors. Facebook could argue a similar case, that for the health of the VR market there should be fewer competitors.
I'm not a lawyer so I don't know if any of those would be winning arguments, but based on previous anti-trust cases I've followed that would be the strategy I would expect. And it might be why the FTC didn't go down that path.
-What if a lot of people use these in the future
-What if they're really comfy when they get slim, and people use them all the time, even for essentially web browsing.
-Later models can easily have internal and mouth facing cameras so you can smile at people in VR
-Let's intimately observe the finest twitch of every expression felt by our users, peering deep into their minds, learning more about how to manipulate and destroy humans than anyone ever thought possible.
(Apologies to George Orwell.)
What would you do with it? What wouldn't you do with it?
Oh what’s that? Your eyes looked at the logo on the shirt the hero is wearing, are you perhaps interested in learning more about where you could buy it?
While that would cool for short-term, independent Oculus can stagnate. VR still needs many more billions to be truly usable, and I don't think independent company will be able to fund it.
My experience has been that technology is far more likely to stagnate at BigCo than SmallCo - especially if SmallCo's only source of revenue is said technology.
I don't think the issue with VR at this point is so much technical than it is that nobody's yet been creative enough to make something truly unique with it.
I'm still a believer, but I suspect there are other non-VR technologies that either need to catch up or just figure out how to dovetail for VR to be anything other than a novelty.
Only when AR is a thing will they stat to push for profitability.
This should be illegal. Amazon and Uber have wiped out small players.
In terms of loss, the actual hardware is profitable as far as I've heard.
There should be regulations around both of these, but they'll need to be different ones.
* No ads (lol)
* Competition from Google even if it did have ads
* FB had no competitive photo app
Instagram for $1B? WhatsApp for $17B? Really?
FTC definitely isn't competent enough to understand how visionary the acquisition was.
To be fair, not many was that competent. Otherwise, Google and other cash-loaded companies would have acquired these companies with higher offer.
It could have easily been Twitter + Vines + Periscope where the acquired products went nowhere.
It's unfair to Zuck for being very visionary about this. But antitrust isn't about being fair to an individual company...
Maybe that's a sign that the acquisitions deserved more scrutiny?
But everyone will make up a number to support whatever side of the argument they are on.
In any case, Whatsapp as a standalone company would definitely go bankrupt. The infra cost would be insane with such little revenue.
I personally disagree with the idea that Zuck was being a "visionary" here. I don't think buying Instagram for $1bn was a particularly visionary move but rather just... cautious. Facebook also bought Gowalla, Lightbox.com, Friendly, TBH and tried to buy Snapchat, Musically (since merged into TikTok), Houseparty, etc. All these are/were competitors and threats. Some were small, some were big. Some worked out and grew, others didn't.
The Instagram acquisition happened fairly early on, so it makes sense that it was worth a lot of money to Facebook. Now that Facebook is huge it can get turned down by a company like Snapchat, and it'll just go ahead and copy/improve its features with its much-larger team, capital, and user-base. Back then, buying the competitor was the best option since Facebook didn't have as many resources or reasons to believe they could compete as effectively.
Moreover, I'd argue the reason Instagram worked out so well is precisely because it got acquired by Facebook. Had Instagram had to figure out its own monetization strategy, find its own clients, compete with the established players, build its own infrastructure, etc. it probably wouldn't have been able to grow as much or as quickly.
But seriously, by what rationale would you block the purchase in 2012? Instagram only had 25 million users at the time.
Facebook was huge, and Instagram didn't represent anything Facebook couldn't just build themselves, other than the growing user base. So there is your rationale, the behemoth shouldn't be completely free to consolidate users. Of course the details of how big is too big and so on are the hard part.
From an entrepreneurial point of view I wonder how it will affect the future of big tech players acquiring other companies.
It won't.
The full power of the United States does not reverse all those shares you sold to a big tech company, or sold as a big shareholder of a big tech company.
If the market tolerates a price, based on their own exuberance and view of future revenues, that is fine here, and the incentives will continue to promote near term profits with a who-gives-a-shit slim possibility of cleanup by the regulators.
Corporations are just a conduit for money, and the regulators only enforce actions on the conduit, and thats a maybe.
I'm holding off on merging my Oculus and Facebook accounts as long as possible in hopes that someone tells them to get the hell out of here with that nonsense.
I agree we would’ve been better off if they had never been allowed to buy Instagram AND we had meaningful laws in place, but I don’t see how this fundamentally changes things given where we are now.
1. That FB split into N independent companies, whereupon each share of FB would become 1 share in each of N companies.
2. That the supermajor shareholders (say, more than 10% of any company) each pick at most one company to retain that interest in, and sell off shares in the other companies until they had less than 10% of each of those).
3. That the new companies avoid overlapping directors.
It would be a long time in court. See the breakup of AT&T.
https://money.cnn.com/infographic/technology/att-merger-hist...
Worst case: there's a lot of legal kerfuffle and he is a multi-billionaire