Such a weird thing for regulators to be chasing - there seems to be so many more obvious issues than this. Is this a political winner - in other words, does the average person think I can put of Burger King flyers in a McDonalds store?
Walmart's legalese:
> C. Prohibited Content
> * contains advertisements, solicitations, or spam links to other web sites or individuals, without prior written permission from Walmart;
https://www.walmart.com/help/article/walmart-com-terms-of-us...
Facebook on the other hand, promotes itself for creating and sharing user content. If it then moderates in ways that are not disclosed, opaque, and with little recourse, their deceptive behavior is neither ethic or in line with how they promote themselves as a service.
Facebook (and social media in general) is essentially a public forum and comes with the expectations of such since these companies control such a large part of internet discourse.
If all of them said "we won't allow anyone to talk about any of our competitors on our site" then it strikes me as a company using their dominance to silence other players in the market, i.e. anti competitive behavior.
Facebook claims to be a social network. Those types of networks normally DO NOT allow you to promote other social networks.
Even review platforms which are a bit more communication in nature block posting other sites reviews.
I don't see how that makes it legal.
Herey other examples of potential actions that would also clearly qualify as illegal anti-competive behavior:
Microsoft could decide to block the download pages for Chrome and Firefoz from being shown in IE.
Google could block results related to Bing in their search engine or browser.
I don't see how this behavior by Facebook is any different. If it can be shown that this was done deliberately by Facebook, I have little doubt that it would also qualify as anti-competive behavior.
When you first search on bing for chrome downloads they will put up a big edge promo above the result. After you download they will pop up a box asking if you are sure you want to switch as edge is "Faster and more secure".
The problem for mastadon is it has a TON of content that is against facebook policies. So facebook can simply say - users are reporting this crap as spam - we've blocked it. Done.
European law tends to favor maximizing competitors. American law tends to favor maximizing consumer value. At first glance, these can be considered equivalent, but they differ at the margins (which is why, for example, Amazon keeps getting hit with antitrust in France but not in the US).
I thought what happened to alternative social networks was a warning to show that not only they can do it to anyone but it shows how anti-competitive they really are.
What happened here to this person mentioning Mastodon is no different but was like 1% of what Facebook and many other private platforms can really do.
Nowadays most of our communication channels are owned by corporations. Are you okay that they get to decide what we're allowed to talk about? Zoom for example banned meetings talking about the Tiananmen Square massacre; You can't post links to The Pirate Bay in private chats on Facebook... on private chat!
And this coming from me who's quite okay with Twitter banning Trump and other idiots off their platform.