I laughed at this because I thought the same thing.
Conspiratorial or no, that line of argument won't fly. Saying everything is so integrated that it can't possibly be decentralized is basically proof of monopoly.
Conspiratorial or no, that line of argument won't fly. Saying everything is so integrated that it can't possibly be decentralized is basically proof of monopoly.
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/pl/IP_17_...
What was the argument there? It's not like that's solving the halting problem.
I'm not saying I necessarily believe facebook here, but I don't understand how they are contradicting themselves here.
That doesn't make any sense to me. I would expect different applications from the same company to share the same underlying infrastructure. Whether or not they are a monopoly is orthogonal to the issue of integration.
So, I get you here and what you're saying. But companies at this scale argue they're "independently managed" or whatever.
With that context, for Facebook, there's really no way of saying that these 3 different brands are independent when it comes down to it.
It'd be much like Procter & Gamble saying their 100s of brands were all really different institutional entities.
Here we have core infrastructure that isn't sold to anyone else and powering 3 supposedly different social messaging services.
The key isn't the backend, it's the supposed independence of the frontends.
This doesn't matter from the standard of antitrust law. What most fail to grasp is that being a monopoly is not illegal. It's only illegal to use monopoly power to harm consumer welfare.
In this case integration between services is a pretty strong defense against this. Facebook can argue that consolidating the infrastructure allows them to deliver each product at a lower cost and/or higher quality than if it was served independently.
If the court accepted those facts, then Facebook would have a ironclad argument against being broken up under the consumer welfare standard.
> This doesn't matter from the standard of antitrust law. What most fail to grasp is that being a monopoly is not illegal. It's only illegal to use monopoly power to harm consumer welfare.
Citation needed? I thought, in the US at least, that the government will go after you if you use your monopoly powers to enter into other markets. For instance Google surfacing its own, other products as the top results in search.
Some would argue though that back then DOJ 'cared' more.
Given the current makeup of the court, it seems extremely unlikely that the justices would overturn this precedent.
The summary is that the Chicago school of Economics promoted the idea that in a competitive market, predatory pricing is not possible. Thus, when you see an industry structure emerge (e.g. duopoly), you should assume that it is an efficient competitive outcome. After this, instead of focusing on market share percentages, antitrust authorities began to focus primarily on consumer harm (which is much more challenging to show in court e.g. for predatory pricing, you cannot only argue that your competitor has very low prices right now, you also have to prove that they intend to raise prices once they achieve monopoly power).
Some of the other desktop integration features of Internet Explorer 4 were pretty nice though.
These days most desktop environments allow for desktop widgets and usually there's a web view widget amongst them. So you can still have your web desktop if you wanted. At least now computers are powerful enough, and the frontend tools are useful enough, that there is some arguable benefit.
- FTC Approved these as as legitimate acquisitions
- Facebook has direct competitors that can overtake them in just a few years
- Instagram was made by a few python coders in months. This shows how easy it is to make a product that competes with Facebook
Server side was a few python components with lots of tricks in Postgres for scaling purposes. You didn't have any real choices for what language you used in iOS
>Instagram was made by a few python coders in months. This shows how easy it is to make a product that competes with Facebook
Then why did Facebook buy Instagram, instead whipping up some python code on their own if it's so easy?
I would conclude they bought them to be anti-competitive.
FYI that's exactly what they did when they broke up Ma Bell into the 7 RBOC's. Same company, same massive infrastructure. They owned everything and the government was still able to break them up.