Facebook documents offer a treasure trove for Washington’s antitrust war
politico.com
politico.com
My own read. Facebook is fighting for - and likely losing - the attention of younger users.
Tiktok and others are doing relatively well.
This is the problem with these networks, they become your parents network. Myspace gone, friendster gone.
The FTC claims of monopoly are laughable?
Tiktok seems to be crushing Facebook in downloads and in time in app, and now I heard was even crushing youtube (all of these folks are competing, youtube has youtube community and patreon style features now with chat etc as well).
is facebook huge? For sure. Is it a monopoly? Have folks not heard of things like tiktok.
Will be interesting if China goes after tiktok the way the US is going after facebook.
Not really adding much value to this whole conversation; just an observation.
Anyway, everything about monopoly is about the market space. FB has no monopoly in places-to-post-stuff-and-get-attention-online… except in the many many countries that FB successfully took over where there is near-zero use of the rest the internet, but those cases don't apply to U.S. anti-trust law.
FB has more monopoly power in some other market areas. Not a complete monopoly, but they have a lot of dominance in the market space of targetted social-driven advertising.
Tiktok only competes on user interests within their app but can’t collect user profiles elsewhere. In terms of privacy, they’re harmless compared to FB/Google/Twitter.
Was a very early user on FB (the week it launched at my college), but now I can’t be bothered to keep up.
My kids are probably young enough to be maybe 2-3 cycles removed from whatever the Next Big App is, but I can’t even really fathom what those might be and I can assure you I won’t understand them.
I sound like my dad 15 years ago…
What part did you not understand?
Facebook should be a great way to connect with people new and old and keep in touch with other people's lives and maybe plan real life events. But Facebook's home page is a newsfeed that rarely shows you posts from friends that you care about and you have to go out of your way to make use of the platform's better features. Also, since most people don't unfriend/unfollow old connections, as time goes on, Facebook's utility naturally goes down.
Doesn’t everyone on what’s app have a phone number that’s known to the people they have on WhatsApp? Couldn’t they just text each other?
Tik tok and Facebook are very different social networks. Facebook is way more than that actually. A lot of people all over the world only browser the internet through Facebook, do all their business transaction via Facebook, this is even truer outside the west.
https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/29/tiktok-shopping-expands-wi...
https://squareup.com/us/en/press/square-x-tiktok
> Tik tok isn't widely used to recruit candidates for jobs.
https://www.axios.com/tiktok-job-hiring-tiktok-576f3b99-602c...
> Tik tok doesn't double as a customer service for big companies
Not for long.
TikTok is going to eat the world. They'd be stupid not to.
Cherry picking examples is not a good argument
I think the best way to describe it is in relation to twitter, which I use heavy for 2-3 days in a row once every few months. Twitter exposes my to lots of interesting things, but ultimately is depressing because of how everyone is so shrill and unwilling to give the benefit of a doubt, and interactions feel hollow.
Tiktok is just pure entertainment, and rarely do I not come way in a better mood. It's like they took r/videos and r/gifs and distilled them into their core components and deliver them through a fire hose.
Will they be gone in a few years? Maybe, but I doubt it. Whatever they're doing it's working and makes me feel better and happier when I use it, so that's a win.
The whole platform seems to be just a means of getting kids hooked on porn. Not once did any post show up based on my interests.
Maybe I’m just too old to figure it out but I couldn’t find any way to get out of endless posts like that.
> The whole platform seems to be just a means of getting kids hooked on porn.
I don't see anything like that anymore. You know what I see? Science teachers doing cool experiments with physics and chemicals. Makers making cool things in a montage. That guy that does animal facts in funny ways. Dog and cat videos. Comedy.
Apparently commenting on a post will indicate interest too? I know I've seen a comment that said "commenting so I end up on $something-tok", because there's a bunch of sub-tiktoks that people end up on because they've been identified as liking that type of content. It's not exactly something that's easily manually indicated from what I've seen, but it seems to happen well organically.
> Maybe I’m just too old to figure it out but I couldn’t find any way to get out of endless posts like that.
Just bypass them as soon as you identify them as something you aren't interested in. Soon enough you should see things that are more to your liking.
I just don’t know that I want to give them a 4th try.
Sure the "three year" timespan is dumb. FB grew way beyond fad, but the predicted generational dynamics didn't magically go away. In fact, it seems like that hypothesis is playing out. What the real question is, can FB buy another hot social network, before they lose both money and skill.
Even Yahoo was dominate in multiple spaces once.
More broadly, it turns out that once you are a company with access to billions of dollars, you will utilize that advantage to stay afloat. People still have some idea that if a business is outmanuevered/outgunned by a competitor, they will close down honorably, and that because teens are fickle they'll move on, etc, and this is all super unpredictable and unquantifiable and there's definitely not entire departments (with budgets as large as the GDP of Latin American countries) designed to account for this. You know, like the OP's leaks show Facebook has. Those rules might be true for your little mom and pop business, for your silly little thing. But not for these kinds of companies that can do an arms race for eyeballs to stay afloat, and they do not engage in the same rules as you.
You can rest assured, no matter how much it upsets you, that TikTok will be almost certainly be around longer in its current form than like 95% of the code written by people using this forum today, including your own.
That's entirely irrelevant to the "is Facebook a monopoly" question. If Facebook is losing market share to a very different social network, this still shows Facebook doesn't have absolute control of it's customers and market. I would strong suspect that every rising social network is going to be significantly different from the social network it captures users from.
Facebook competes with linked-in for business stuff, Amazon and craigslist for selling, Tik Tok for youth attention etc.
The main thing is an argument for Facebook being powerful, influential and even abusive isn't by itself an argument for it being a monopoly as such.
Asserting "X is not really a monopoly" is not particularly relevant because that's not the standard which matters. It's perfectly plausible for a not-really-a-monopoly with a large but shrinking market share to abuse a dominant position in a particular market (often defined more narrowly than you might think) in ways that violate anti-trust laws.
In particular for US law, this part:
> having a dominant market position and using that for anti-competitive behavior
For the EU, the question can stop there; in the US, there's an additional burden of proof that anti-competitive behavior harms the consumer.
Google is allowed to build a giant search empire because so far, courts have agreed that while it's hard to compete with Google, the consumer is not harmed because a competitor is always a click away and barrier to switching is low.
After a certain point, maintaining size means sustaining an onboarding pipeline. Tobacco and alcohol ran into this issue, espeically as they were busy killing off their longest a-term and most loyal customers. Facebook's not quite there.
Yet.
Yet. Yet. Yet.
There was a time Facebook had none of these things as well.
100% agree. Mark's seen the numbers and he knows the demographic ship is sailing. That's why he's leaning so heavily into Metaverse. He wants his company to compete in 3D/VR/AR/games.
I agree that the regulatory question of whether FB meets the technical requirements of being classed a 'monopoly' is unclear. However, I see the real worry for FB here as going beyond one anti-trust action, it's the building cultural consensus and growing political momentum to "do something". That kind of tidal wave is hard to reverse and difficult to escape unscathed.
I also agree that as pervasive and pernicious as FB is today, it is under serious growing threat from alternatives as well as already "jumping the shark" perceptually with young users. Together those twin storms on the horizon comprise a long-term threat to FB's dominance and relevance. That said, FB's revenue will likely continue 'up and to the right' for several years before the impact is seen in their financials.
It also does its best to control the experience end-to-end to make sure no one can innovate their way out of these algorithmic feeds and ads. People aren't building better client apps because they fear getting sued. Imagine using Facebook but doing so via a comfortable UI that puts you first, gives you complete control, and allows you stuff like cross-posting to other services. This is their nightmare.
And another problem: the US government is on their side from what I see happening (disclaimer: I'm not from US). It should be such that if they do try to sue you over a browser extension or an unofficial app or whatever, they would get laughed out of the court because you were in your right to do what you did. But unfortunately, there are apparently laws that do allow them to sue people trying to improve their own user experience on someone else's online service.
Monopoly definition: the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service
Why doesn't FB let other businesses else access friend lists via API? or send people messages via API? Same with Google and all their data about you. They just can't do it.
They love to take the most bad-faith reading of the API docs to say that Facebook is giving your data away (see their story about netflix/messenger, or Microsoft's Facebook client for Windows phones)
FWIW, Apple is a monopoly as far as iOS app distribution goes. They act as if they own the relationships between app developers and their users. This stifles innovation. They also keep playing moral police even though they have no obligation to do this (as in, "you have to change the ToS of your service to be allowed to have an iOS app").
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
obvious they can't innovate on their own at this point
Just because you don't own 100% of a market doesn't mean you don't have a commanding position.
2) If someone who owned a single oil well in time of Standard Oil could get their oil to consumers and profitably sell it, then however big Standard Oil might be, then it didn't have a standard monopoly. Of course, that's not how things work back then. Standard Oil controlled the refineries and so well owners were over a barrel. Facebook has tried to control the Internet pipes but basically failed everywhere.
>All told, Facebook has 174 million daily active users in the U.S., according to the internal data. By comparison, Google-owned YouTube has 122 million
If you want to see basically any video online, from funny cats to Facebook depositions, you're using YT. It seems to me that if you're an "internet user", at least in this countries I've know anything about, you're a "YT user".
Then it makes sense. I'd expect MAU to be higher than FB though.
Microsoft went net sideways from 1998 to 2013, and then up ten fold since.
Their operating income margin, for a company so massive, is mind boggling. $70 billion in operating income from $168b in sales (41.6%). By comparison it was 28% in 2013. So their margin has rather dramatically re-expanded during the Nadella era, like they're a younger company again. I think Microsoft is benefiting from not gorging and becoming obese again (employee count vs sales) as it did during the late Gates years and the Ballmer years. Microsoft could trivially load up on people for no great reason other than to always be expanding to fill the margin (many companies do that), but they seem to have made a conscious decision to be more disciplined. I bet that's working in their favor, as high levels of bloat usually acts like quicksand for larger older companies. They're probably more nimble now than when they had half the sales back in 2013. Nadella seemed immediately able to relax on the Windows-everything philosophy in a way Gates and Ballmer were unable to (they were perhaps too wed to the first chapter of Microsoft, people get blinded by such biases, even very smart people). And to his credit, Gates didn't try to get in Nadella's way as he made changes, Gates had been chairman of Microsoft from 1981 to 2014, with his stature and financial capabilities he could have been a real slag in the way of change.
When Nadella started, I actually said to others that for the first time in my career I would consider working at Microsoft.
Also they sold the shit out of Azure. Every big enterprise contract would include $500,000 of Azure credit for free, and the sales reps would constantly remind you that you're going to lose your free money. So CIOs would say, "Hey we have all this credit we should use it" and then all of a sudden their company was using Azure and liking it (because it's a pretty great platform if you're already using a ton of MS products in your enterprise).
It's no coincidence Nadella was in charge of Azure before being CEO. He knows how to make things developers actually like.
Basically all the old tools were written in excel/word/ppt and it was cheaper to just subscribe to O365 than to switch. Monetizing yearly subscriptions is way more profitable than waiting every 5-10 years for people to buy the next version.
They bought GitHub and LinkedIn