Lawsuit aiming to break up Facebook group Meta can go ahead, US court rules | Hacker News Reader

Lawsuit aiming to break up Facebook group Meta can go ahead, US court rules

theguardian.com

266 pointspseudolus186 comments

Where's the meaningful action against ISP's? In my opinion, ISP monopolies and collusion cause orders of magnitude more consumer harm than FAANG by a lot. If one is truly interested in helping out consumers, start with the less flashy lawsuits against monopolies that do more direct consumer harm than FAANG. Starting with FAANG (in my opinion) betrays the true motivation of this action which is political theater instead of meaningful action.

Thank you. I always bring this up. Politicians like targeting things that they gripe about being excluded from to get more votes, but there are much more serious problems that they are ignoring.

Because they don't actually care about helping anyone besides themselves. Both sides of the aisle, its all just posturing to maintain power

IMHO Visa and Mastercard duopoly are way more powerful than other companies like Facebook or Google. In the end, people still need to pay for services and they use credit cards to pay for it. If Mastercard or Visa don't want a service do exist, they can simply block it and then people won't be able to use the service. The recent OnlyFans and PornHub controversies prove my point. OnlyFans was in the verge of banning explicit porn in their plataform.

https://www.protocol.com/policy/onlyfans-visa-mastercard

Chamath argued in a recent episode of the All in Podcast that Visa and Mastercard are going to get wrecked soon, as it becomes apparent they are an unnecessary trillion dollar parasite on the economy. They add a 2-3% tax on every transaction and can block people out at will, as you note. But now we increasingly have cheaper alternatives that are also censorship resistant.

> And we increasingly have cheaper alternatives that are also censorship resistant.

Such as?

"Web3 crypto projects"[0] he's long on and ready to pump. He's a salesman and his conviction only goes as deep as his lock-up agreements, which thankfully aren't a thing in crypto.

0: https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/billionaire-chamath-paliha...

Bitcoin. "Crypto enthusiasts" and the uninitiated will argue that "Bitcoin doesn't scale to Visa levels", but it does through the Lightning Network.

Most critiques assume that you don't need the graph of liquidity-weighted edges that Lightning Network requires to achieve cheap transactions at high throughput. I seriously doubt this isn't necessary without handing over control to a central third party and thus creating something with the same properties as VISA.

The bitcoin-to-bitcoin transactions may be censorship resistant, but sooner or later you will have to cash out to pay for other things (even if just taxes). We've simply moved the censorship from point-of-sale to point-of-exchange-to-fiat.

I am a Crypto-Enthusiast but people need to realize that "being your own bank" is actually a paranoid nightmare of responsibility. Bitcoin, and other cryptos, are tremendously intimidating to the average person. Even I get nervous when sending any significant amount of crypto and I've been doing this for almost ten years now.

Just look at this: 17XiVVooLcdCUCMf9s4t4jTExacxwFS5uh

Now imagine telling the average person to take note of this and send the Bitcoin equivalent of $1,000 to it. Clearly, you would need to build a system around Bitcoin in order to make it user-friendly enough for the average person to ever feel comfortable using on a regular basis. At which point, though, you've just remade a bank and a payment processor.

What's the difference in scanning a QR code vs swiping a card? Even with CC you have to constantly enter it manually or store it in browser.

This is going to sound odd, but I think the QR code still carries the same level of 'unrecognizable' that a long string of alphanumeric text does. My brain can't really parse or recognize a QR code from memory. As such, I have a sense of unease. However, I am able to roughly recite my credit card number because it is 4 sets of 4 digit numbers.

But you're right that you can offload addresses to browser or app memory just like with credit cards and get rid of some of the trepidation that way.

Oh, cool. How does the lightning network handle stuff like chargebacks?

And reinstating access when cards or other credentials are lost?

And so on, and so forth, etc. The actually hard parts aren't about moving money around.

> The actually hard parts aren't about moving money around

Yes, they are, if you're trying to be censorship resistant and scale transaction throughput. Do you have any examples, or was your original comment about showing us there are no possible alternatives to the full feature set of existing payment processors at their current price point?

With Strike or BlueWallet you can do this today.

The Federal Reserve is working on FedNow to replace FedWire. It will deliver a replacement for Visa/Mastercard in many ways.

While a government system that makes electronic money transfer a utility should exist, the real benefit of credit cards for merchants is that credit card users are willing to pay a higher price and thus catering to credit card users results in more profit. This is evidenced by the fact that all major merchants do not offer discounts for using debit cards/cash, with the exception of Target. But even Target does not make it easy, you have to sign up for a Redcard and link your debit card to it.

Merchants that do not like credit card processing fees already stipulate card purchase amount minimums or discounts for cash/debit. The merchants that do not evidently are betting that more money can be made from selling goods at higher prices to credit card users.

Of course Visa/Mastercard offer debit, but even with FedNow, I suspect many merchants, especially the biggest, will continue to want buyers to use credit cards, and hence support Visa/Mastercard/Amex/Discover.

> But now we increasingly have cheaper alternatives that are also censorship resistant

I really hope you're not referring to crypto.

It exists. It works. And governments, companies, and individuals have started to adopt it for real transactions (rather that speculation).

The ship has already sailed. Get over it.

You still have to pay a payment processor if you aren't doing it in-house, on top of gas and conversion fees

Conversion fees are a problem for the time being[1], but the Bitcoin lightning network solves the issues of gas and payment processing. There are entire countries using crypto currencies now. Cheaper doesn't mean free.

1: assuming you need to convert, which isn't always true. You can use bitcoin as is (case in point, El Salvador).

> They add a 2-3% tax on every transaction

That's incorrect. It is true that merchants generally pay 2.9% to process card transactions. But, the vast majority of that goes to entities outside of the card network.

Visa has a net income of 50% its revenues. There's a loot of margin for the taking.

That says more about the way the company does corporate accounting than its business model. Microsoft also has roughly the same reported margin -- does that mean that there's a lot of margin for the taking with Microsoft? No. You're taking a noisy signal and putting meaning into it which isn't there.

Again, the networks take a small fraction of the overall fee, and the vast majority go to entities outside of the card network itself. Take a look at how the merchant discount rate breaks down, and you'll see who the true takers of those processing fees are.

Yeah, thats exactly what net income means. Its an accounting of the actual profits your company generates after all expenses. Its a standardized measure, which means you are able to compare apples to apples.

Both are oligopolistic market players that can command price, and then generate outsized profits from their large market share. Both have fat margins, that has nothing to do with how easy that margin is to take away. Average corporate profits (net income) run 10-15%, so any outsized margin beyond that is a good indication that the company is able to generate excess profits through whatever means.

A 2-3% is tax is a small price to pay for being able to carry out chargebacks against sellers that don't deliver.

Also, pretty sure their cut is more like 1% after you take into account the 2% cashback.

Yes the cut is much smaller and doesn't all go to visa/mastercard (card brand). The card processor, acquirer, and in most cases a gateway also gets a cut.

Very much this. There is no other payment mechanism in existence (correct me if there is) where strong consumer protection is enshrined into the regulation.

With credit cards I can have zero worry about fraud charges because I'm not going to lose any money over it and that's guaranteed by regulation, not by the goodwill of the bank (which could change any moment, the regulation won't).

Also with credit cards I have no worry about unscrupulous vendors because I can always do a charge back if they don't deliver and I get my money back.

I also fear no future payment mechanisms will ever have these kinds of protections, because these regulations come from a different era when the US was still willing to impose consumer protection regulations. That political climate isn't here now.

Right, it ends up being a good deal.

And I don't see how censorship resistant becomes a thing. If the government wants to block my participation on the system, then I'm sure it will find a way. If the government can't block participation, then it can take the whole thing down.

>"But now we increasingly have cheaper alternatives that are also censorship resistant."

I eagerly await them. However, I strongly suspect there is a massive network effect in-place that keeps Visa and Mastercard dominant. So many businesses want to stop taking credit card payments but the loss of business is often way too much. Anecdotally, getting my paycheck through direct-deposit means I almost never carry cash on me anymore. I would hope that business can find a new payment processor but I am still skeptical, as those companies also want a percentage of the transaction through fees.

> 2-3% tax on every transaction

What's actually happening is that a ton of that is getting channeled into frequent flier miles and cash back and rewards and so on.

Not all of course, and there's probably room for disruption, but that's relevant.

My card gives 2% back on everything, so it's more like a 0-1% tax.

2-3% "tax" isn't really a tax, it's a small cost to increase the buying power of people without debt and its a small fee for the recourse action buyers have in shopping protection.

For example, with my costco card I get extended warranty on everything I purchase, fraud protection, buyer protection and I get cash back. If i was a retailer, I'd be super thrilled that people use Costco cards because my products I sell are backed by that cards extended coverage and consumer protections. They file the extended warranty claim with the card carrier, not me. Sure, I can sell junk coverage - which many electronic stores used to do but those were always junk and didn't turn into revenue streams when the cost of selling junk caught up to people refusing to shop there and hating the store/service. (Looking at your Circuit City)

Prior to credit cards, we'd never have a TV, Microwave or computer in every home.

Not saying that I "Love it", but we can't deny the buying power of debt and what that has done for consumers and more importantly retailers over the years.

Interestingly, for many purchases if the bank chooses to charge it as a debit, then you have no recourse and some banks consider debit a cash transaction and charge YOU a transaction fee (non bank cash use) that is much more than 1-3% fee in the end that would be in the product...

I have no idea about censorship resistant... i can use my card to buy porn, legal weed or whatever...

None of the legal weed stores in my state take credit cards but they do have ATMs in the lobby. Cannabis is still federally illegal so, as I understand it, banks big enough to issue credit cards want nothing to do with it.

In Colorado, it just shows up as a candy shop or something like that. long time ago it was just ATMs, but i believe they said they set up their own Colorado state Credit Union to process the charges and have been doing so for a while... always joked that it pays to discover

> Visa and Mastercard are going to get wrecked soon, as it becomes apparent they are an unnecessary trillion dollar parasite on the economy.

This is a completely unsupportable view. The rise of CC processing happened because it was manifestly better than the options you had before (every seen a hand-written credit list at a bodega?)

Now you can probably squeeze the price point a little, and argue about if/when newer technology means the same level of service could be provided for less (maybe) but the complexity of what they do is pretty high. Not to mention the reach and reliability.

Lot's of people wave hands about crypo/defi being a solution to this but currently that's at best wishful thinking.

BNPL companies are a real potential threat for them though.

I suspect that is more a feature than a bug, from the regulator POV: instead of chasing and potentially failing to quickly remove some economic actor from the market, it takes at most two phone calls.

Pretending that the public interest if behind any of these actions an important part of the system, but certainly not the initiator.

With respect, “whataboutism” doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t also solve the problem of Fuckerberg and whatever he’s calling his latest sneeze machine.

In the rest of the world specially Asian countries QR code payment or similar systems have started competing with Visa and Mastercard duopoly when it comes to debit card payments at least.

Modern Cellular and Starlink are actually bringing some real competition. For the average consumer a Tablet with unlimited data on any major network crushes DSL’s speeds and cost. Starlink is still rolling out, but I suspect it will keep cell networks honest and they both will end up keeping wired ISP’s honest.

This is a good point; if I recall, the Sirius/XM merger was allowed to proceed because, even though that created a monopoly in satellite radio, they were competing in a broader landscape.

Its worth mentioning that both LEO & WISP are explicitly not include in net neutrality provisions. That being said any net neutrality provisions outside of CA is kind of up in the air right now so I don't know if that really matters.

A few years ago when Net Neutrality was a big topic, there was a lot of focus on them. At some point I felt the news cycle was being manipulated as ISPs kept pointing fingers (and I suspect increased their lobbying budget) at FAANG that they were just as bad, if not worse. “Why should we be subject to regulations when these other Internet companies aren’t!”, completely ignoring that there’s a huge difference between the utility companies who provide the actual Internet connection vs ones who provide services via a web site.

Evidently most people seem to have taken the bait, and everyone stopped caring that ISPs are tracking and selling every DNS query you make from their networks.

Over the last few years, most of the internet upgraded to TLS. This technological shift made it much harder, and in many cases borderline impossible, for ISPs to mess with the traffic.

That’s why I mentioned DNS queries, as those are/were not protected by TLS. This behavior is one of the major reasons browsers pushed so hard for DNS over HTTPS.

Yeah, but I’m pretty sure DNS over HTTPS will become default in a couple of years.

I don’t believe the government should spend taxpayer’s money fighting a problem which will soon disappear automatically, regardless of their [in]actions.

By the way, if you haven't already you should enable DNS over HTTPS or DNS over TLS.

Hopefully device providers make it standard sooner rather than later and eliminate insecure DNS.

I'd rather them do this and then go after ISPs too than give a free pass to both because of such whataboutism based criticism.

What is the actual harm? I can choose between copper, coax and fiber and there are at least multiple providers on the copper.

Prices are reasonable and speeds are good.

> I can choose between copper, coax and fiber and there are at least multiple providers on the copper.

Your experience is unusual; I don't think I've ever lived anywhere with more than 2 options, and surprising chunks of the USA have fewer.

Yeah, in most of the places I've lived, I've only had one choice, and it's been quite expensive for the quality.

Many places in the United States don't have the luxury. I'm in a county of half a million people and there are are basically two options: Comcast cable (which is decently fast for downloads) and a variety of resellers who all run on Verizon's DSL network.

No fiber options unless I want to give Comcast the blood of my firstborn and then pay $300 a month for the privilege. Verizon has been promising fiber "any day now" for the past 10 years.

My street also only got fiber this year.

What is the actual harm / collusion? You can choose from a wide variety of ISPs, which are decent to your own admission, but the harm is it is not fiber ?

Cry me a river.

wide variety of ISPs that give you "SuperFast 15mbit* ADSL"

*speed not guaranteed.

How much is that a month? I am getting 50 down, 25 up for IIRC € 30.

where i live, around $50-$60. and so we will be clear, it's maximum speed :)

Maximum speed in the EU is much more expensive.

let me rephrase it. it's the only speed.

If it is the only speed, technically it is neither fast nor slow, is it?

In the 80s we had 2400 bauds only and we liked it.

Most places in the US only have a single ISP option. There's a word that describes this situation that rhymes with "phonopoly."

The past two years should've made it clear that public education and the workforce increasingly depend on having access to bandwidth. Of course this was already a trend, but the pandemic accelerated it, affecting entire household bandwidth consumption at once. I disagree with the implication that wanting (needing?) fiber is somehow equivalent to whining.

I can effectively choose between two: Comcast and Verizon/their resellers. I said Comcast _downstream_ speeds are decent. Their _upstream_ speeds are atrocious.

Comcast only provides coax. Verizon and their resellers only support aging copper DSL lines.

No fiber is available unless I pay Comcast literally thousands of dollars just to bring the line to my house. Then they want to charge me $300 a month on top of that.

I did not suggest there was harm or collusion between Comcast and Verizon. I only pointed out that your experience of having a plethora of acceptable ISPs is unusual in most of the United States.

In most places in the US you have one or two choices of providers, and prices are often pretty high for good internet service - as much as double what it could be in a more competitive market, with speeds that don't match. Even in major cities, upload speeds with any major provider suck... I got the gigabit from Comcast just because I wanted the 35mbps up, whereas the next plan down (600mbps download) was going to only give 15mbps up. And despite being in San Francisco, our only real choices in our building are Comcast and At&t.

If you can get AT&T it means you can get Sonic as well. AT&T still handles the last mile, but it's Sonic on the other end.

My more charitable take is that they are trying to pick a fight they can win based on the political and legal landscape. Antitrust enforcement has been weakened, diminished, and atrophied since the Borkism infected both political parties in the late 70s and early 80s. As such, they have to pick their early battles careful in order to gain experience, figure out which strategies can prevail in court, in public opinion, etc.

We all want to see them take on the big fight with monopolists like the ISPs, but no one has more experience fighting antitrust action. The current set of DOJ lawyers and federal judges are not the ones who broke up ATT in the 50s and 80s, they're going to have to rebuild the foundation of antitrust enforcement.

The current set of lawyers and judges and officials for this are political appointees one and all, and will only pick fights on behalf of the political faction. The current detente was only because "each side" had their pet companies.

Facebook has messed up in that managed to anger both sides of the political spectrum. They foolishly thought they could thread a needle here. Now one side is going to make an example of them. The best we can hope is that the other side will make an example on the opposite end when they take power.

But make no mistake that they will take anti trust action against parties that have successfully threaded the needle like the ISPs. Both sides are bought by them

Eh, there are three sides - Democrats, Republicans and true believers like Lina Khan. The believers need to notch some wins before taking on a big bad like Charter or ATT, and as you note, Facebook made themselves an attractive target. You take those where you can get them and win big to build cachet for going after bigger cases in the future.

True believers think this will open a door. But in reality they are just being used to do all the work to kill a target one side wants dead. They will then see the doors firmly shut again. The only way this doesnt happen is if the other side decides they should do the same trick to their opponents using the same true believers as weapons.

We may be at the point where this back and forth is preferable.....

Nice whataboutism.

In reality, US ISPs are a PITA with limited impact, while OTTs have gotten a grasp on large parts of our society, both domestically and abroad.

The worst part about your claim is that the likes of Google or Facebook have gotten there by relentlessly lobbying for ISP power to be controlled by regulation. It's only fair that now that they have become unavoidable entities, they also get labeled and regulated as utility.

What does OTT stand for? Don't think I've seen that acronym before.

From what I understand Over The Top. Basically the services that run using the internet infrastructure.

This framing feels a bit weird though so I very well may be wrong.

> Nice whataboutism.

It's "whataboutism" to question the priorities of our politicians now?

Questioning that a well-deserved lawsuit going ahead on the basis that others would also deserve the attention is definitely whataboutism.

Yes. There are alternatives to using facebook and especially instagram. But, when it comes to your ISP, there is no alternative and that makes ISPs a much bigger threat and much more harmful to society. It's especially egregious that ISPs bribe politicians and engage in rent seeking behavior, something we don't see much of from Facebook.

i mean, sure facebook isn't ideal but it's also not the biggest foe we need to worry about.

With respect, “whataboutism” doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t also solve the problem of Fuckerberg and whatever he’s calling his latest sneeze machine.

Targeting Facebook and not Google or Amazon for tech monopoly is not a good look, and just makes people feel like Zuck didnt make the right political donations and didnt censor for the benefit of the party in power hard enough.

Whether Meta qualifies or not is a different question, but Facebook as your first target?

In the balance between looking good and getting started somewhere, what's more important?

Facebook's purchases of WhatsApp, Oculus, and Instagram probably make them a softer target given how they've used those properties. On top of that, they've had some of the worst overall news.

Why not start with thesortedt target and get some ammunition when you go for the others?

Facebook actually has pretty decent arguments why all their products have strong competition. They can also make some arguments about how the other tech giants have much worse monopolies.

Antitrust is not about monopolies. It's true Facebook is not a monopoly in the classic sense of that word.

Antitrust is about anticompetitiveness. Big tech and especially Facebook is in this new situation where they're causing anticompetitiveness not due to supply side control (i.e. you can get other services that compete against Facebook's products). They're causing anticompetitiveness due to demand side control - the social media that people want to use _in practice_ is all controlled by Facebook. Not because Facebook is intrinsically a superior product (e.g. cheaper, quality of content, technical qualities), but due to network effects and acquisitions of network effect through Instagram and Whatsapp.

We're in a new situation where new precedent needs to be created in what kind of demand side control is desired, permitted and should be dealt with. Which makes this new territory, and it also means that a defense of "we have decent competitors" shouldn't be a decisive argument on Facebook's behalf.

>the social media that people want to use _in practice_ is all controlled by Facebook

Twitter? Reddit? LinkedIn?

Hell TikTok just passed Whatsapp in monthly active participants.

Anticompetitiveness is hard to argue when one of your largest competitors started after all of these acquisitions

I'm not saying it's a clear cut case. I'm just saying that we should view this in a different light than past antitrust cases.

Kia, Ferrari and caterpillar are not competitors despite all producing vehicles.

In the same way TikTok, LinkedIn and WhatsApp are not competitors. Every sensible person understands that.

But are you arguing that Instagram and TikTok are not competitors? Or WhatsApp and Telegram? Or Facebook and Twitter?

Facebooks buying Oculus is kind of a weird example. WhatsApp could be argued buying a competitor. But buying Oculus seems like a clear example of buying a company for its technology because you want to use it. Did Facebook have some kind of competing VR program i didnt know about?

Breaking up tech is a pretty bipartisan sentiment, I'm not sure that people feel like it's because FB didn't pay enough to play.

In my mind there are a bunch of political reasons to choose FB first.

1. Older generations are familiar with what a central role FB plays in their lives, and regardless of what side you find yourself on the political divide, you either think they are pushing radicalizing ads or have silenced e.g. antivax rhetoric which you might agree with.

2. Many people don't really know Alphabet exists. Google is a search company in many people's minds, maybe an email/calendar one too. Outside of HN and maybe some frustrated Q-tubers, I'm not sure people have much hatred for Google.

3. Breaking up Amazon can pretty quickly be spun as a worker's rights/union issue, and I can see how Republicans might have a hard time being seen as promoting unions.

At least that's my armchair analysis

3. Workers rights would be an especially ineffective angle, given Amazon’s enthusiasm for replacing humans with machines wherever possible.

I think there’s something a bit iffy about the Kindle looking like a loss-leader for the books, and separately consumer rights & small business issues due to “equivalent” products being substituted silently to make stuff arrive sooner, but a fight over worker rights is just likely to mean it uses “humans need not apply” warehouses even sooner.

If that is or isn’t a good outcome, I lack the economic background to even guess confidently. But it would definitely be a spectacular fail politically.

I think you're right, and I don't think most dems would approach it that way, but I think that Republican news outlets would be framing it that way, and the more progressive wing of the dems wouldn't be able to deny their pro-union sentiment when questioned.

I'm just saying there's a ripe culture jamming opportunity here for the right, and it's a tactic they're pretty great at.

> ...but a fight over worker rights is just likely to mean it uses “humans need not apply” warehouses even sooner. The humans at Amazon's warehouses are being utilized as meat-robots in any case, robots that Amazon doesn't have to repair when they break down.

This "Sharecroppers or tractors" argument doesn't even register as a dilemma for me: if you're going to take human labor, then pay a living wage, if not, then automate and free the humans to work elsewhere. It's a net-negative on society to have an employed person on food-stamps.

Agriculture used to be a major "employer" and then got mechanized; society seems to be better for it.

> 2. Many people don't really know Alphabet exists. Google is a search company in many people's minds, maybe an email/calendar one too. Outside of HN and maybe some frustrated Q-tubers, I'm not sure people have much hatred for Google.

Politicians and FTC must know the real alphabet. Like, they're gov agencies who job it is to know this stuff. In fact, existing suits by the government against google show they do in fat know.

> n my mind there are a bunch of political reasons to choose FB first.

I'm not actually sire that FB is first, i think the media just talks about FB the most.

If they were targeting Amazon, you would probably say "Targeting Amazon and not Google or Facebook for tech monopoly is not a good luck." You need to start somewhere. If you have a specific reason why Facebook is not a monopoly worthy of breaking up, then let's hear it. Some vague theory about not donating money doesn't cut it.

> If they were targeting Amazon, you would probably say "Targeting Amazon and not Google or Facebook for tech monopoly is not a good luck."

Nope.

I don’t have Facebook and have zero interactions with ANY of their products in my life. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft have been harder to extricate myself from. I could, but the inconvenience as a regular consumer would be quite difficult or costly. This hasn’t been the case with FB so I am in very strong agreement with the sentiment of the comment you replied to.

I actually hate Facebook but am reflexively disgusted with the irrational, partisan hatred of it from people who could just delete their accounts and never interact with the company again. At worst, they still log your IP on many websites if you don’t use uBlock or something similar.

> At worst, they still log your IP on many websites if you don’t use uBlock or something similar.

It's fairly easy to think of worse. One clear example is the fact that they've been running facial recognition on non-Facebook users in photos for years.

I can understand an opinion that claims this is worse, but it’s something I don’t personally care about because I don’t take many photos with people who would post them on Facebook. It also occurs in a more public setting than private internet browsing.

At this point, I’m think it’s safe to assume they every picture saved remotely is facial recognitioned. And every public photo has been processed by at least Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook.

It sucks but certainly isn’t anything unique to FB. It would be weird if they didn’t run it through CV even to find stuff like dogs, babies, etc.

Irrational hatred? It's a company that literally was complacent in a genocide. The fact that I haven't logged in during several years doesn't change that.

Just ignoring companies that do harm and saying you don't have to use them is one of the ways companies continue getting away with perpetuating harm.

> I don’t have Facebook and have zero interactions with ANY of their products in my life.

Maybe. But if any of your friends/family is on Facebook, they may have uploaded their contacts, and you quite likely have a "shadow profile" that they're using to track you across the net. You might not know Facebook, but Facebook knows you.

Is that really an issue? Its really a missing data problem. Your data is "missing" and facebook can infer with some probability you exist and the people your "shadow profile" might interact with.

That’s pretty much all there is to it, yeah, just a missing data problem. But once you slap the “shadow profile” label on it, it gets “shady” and “scary”. A pretty cool lesson in how to make something fairly trivial and non-threatening seem scary to people.

Note: not currently or in the past employed by Meta or any affiliated companies, so that’s just purely my own take.

If six of your contacts have provided them with the same name and email address, then they know with near certainty that those six people have you as a mutual contact. When they spot an ad profile with the same email address, that comes with a dossier on your browsing and shopping habits, which are used to infer your interests etc. It's not a "missing" data problem, it's an embarrassment of data problem.

> You need to start somewhere.

Correct, and you may have noticed media and political sentiment turning hard against Facebook coincidentally overnight after it was discovered that the guy who won used it in a more “clever” manner than did the one who lost. What better place to start?

Not that I’m complaining because they all need to go, but there is clear and obvious evidence as to why Facebook is facing the brunt of all of this.

Who are you referring to with won and lost?

Facebook is just obviously not a monopoly. There's TikTok, Snapchat, Twitter, Reddit, and many other social networks. At least 5-10 billion dollar social networks have been created while Facebook exists.

Allowing them to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp were probably not wise decisions. But it hasn't stopped others from competing

Trust != monopoly, for a reason.

For example, OP lists Amazon and Google as other viable targets for trust busting, yet their primary products/services also have competitors. The issue is that, while they do have competitors, the lot of them have decided to act in certain ways that are overly harmful to the consumer.

Would Facebook/Google/Amazon do even more damage as a true monopoly? Of course. Should they have to get to that point before anything is done? Definitely not -- for one, they're too smart to let themselves become proper monopolies.

> Targeting Facebook and not Google

When the last guy won, Google literally had a leadership meeting in which the participants were crying and angry.

Facebook literally helped the last guy win.

Is it truly any wonder one is being targeted harder than the other?

They shouldn't be surprised when Google gets slammed like a truck when the other side takes powers and decides they are the thorn in their side, just like Facebook is the thorn in the other parties side.

There was a reason companies traditionally pretended to be apolitical. (They never actually were, but at least acted like they were reacting to the social sphere instead of actively trying to shape it)

Facebook (and Twitter) are the most likely targets because they're the ones most involved in politics + that politicians, lawyers, and activists can understand. The power that FB and Twitter wield is social and therefore political.

Google and Amazon are smart enough to hide their concerning activities in areas the average person considers completely uninteresting: Infrastructure.

All three are the targets of federal investigations and suits. It would be hard to say which was "first" as all have been ongoing for years and reach various milestones at different times depending on court schedules, commissioner appointments, etc.

Action against Amazon is also currently building towards a formal case from the FCC.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-12-22/amazon-cl... and a lot more if you look into Lina Kahn's previous anti-trust work.

It seems to me that people have started to clutch their pearls with the revelations of psychological manipulation that Facebook has/is doing. I don't know if that's the impetus or not, but it's a big difference.

It’s a joke right? Seems like Meta may end up being the industry’s scapegoat so the gov can say they did something. Probably also explains all the FUD we see in social media about FB, but none of the other tech giants.

To facebooks credit they were good at supporting every platform under the sun and not actively using their breadth/power/reach to stop consumer choice, but be the consumer choice. The best thing that happened to consumers was the failure of Facebook phone - because they wanted to be like google. i'm glad we rejected that.

Google on the other hand, absolutely used its power to stifle competition and still does to this day. Platforms, Content, and Creators live and die by google's whims.

While I'm strongly in favor, in surprised Facebook+WhatsApp+Instagram is a problem while Google+Gmail+YouTube+Meet+GCP+Chrome+Android is not.

Or exchange + office + teams + skype + windows + onedrive + github....

Teams being part of Office 365 is a pretty obvious.

But it was to knee-cap Slack…

Precisely. They're using their success in one space to prevent others from being successful in a different space.

Because, one of them bought the competition, while other just built it themselves. (well, ignoring YT)

Alphabet buys lots of companies, so im not sure what you are talking about here.

Android was bought and Chrome was initially based on webkit.

Android was built by Google. What they bought was a prototype that lacked virtually all of the functionality they needed.

I heard[1] the Android team was pretty insular after being acquired: they wouldn't even let other Googlers into their building on the Google campus. So if it was the same leadership and mostly the same engineers as before acquisition, can you say Google built Android?

Even if they bought a prototype, the acquired the company to execute something Google would have struggled to without the talent, so IMO divining if Google were interested in the product or the personnel is splitting hairs.

1. I have never worked at Google, I'm pulling this information from my recollection of reports & forum submissions back then.

You can argue that instagram and WhatsApp would be viable strong competition to Facebook.

Gmail wouldn’t really be competitor to Google search. YouTube definitely could be though. Chrome isn’t a viable company - GCP is pretty fledgling but possible.

The anti-competitive argument here isn't that Chrome would be a good competitor to Google Search, but that Google operates both products in a way that makes it all but impossible for other companies to create viable competitors to Chrome or Google Search.

How is it all but impossible for companies to create viable competitors to chrome, exactly?

That "or" wasn't meant as "both" or to opine on which one it is.

I personally believe the way Google operate Chrome is one of the reasons it is all but impossible to seriously compete with Google Search. But I'm not the judge.

Try making a web browser that supports Widevine (Google's DRM for web browsers) and see how far you get.

Back in 2019, someone tried exactly this and was blocked by Google as they didn't want another web browser on the market: https://blog.samuelmaddock.com/posts/google-widevine-blocked...

Does edge, brave and Firefox all support it?

Brave is based on Chromium, Edge is migrating to Chromium.

So? The grandparent was also chromium.

Good point, if building on Chromium you still need to get approved by Google for Widevine.

Google made its sites work slower on Edge, and Microsoft got tired of playing catch up:

https://www.windowscentral.com/how-to-fix-slow-edge-youtube

If a company the size of Microsoft decided to throw the towel and use chromium instead of their own thing, what can you expect an startup to do?

If this succeeds, they'll target the others next. Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Apple all have easily divisible lines.

It is pretty ridiculous as Facebook have big competitors in all their markets which aren't even that many. Google has more near-monopolies and in more markets and co-integrated more heavily at that. It's really hard for me to see this as due to just Facebook being a popular target rather than actual solid analyses.

The way I see it Facebook+ is a societal problem and so is a larger one than the usual tech monopoly problem which Google fall in (which is still a problem though, just not on the same level).

Instead of this old school "break 'em up" approach, which just allows them to out lawyer the government, why not simply create regulations which criminalize their specific harmful behavior with teeth big enough to make them stop?

Unfortunately, the answer to my rhetorical question is: because theater.

> why not simply create regulations which criminalize their specific harmful behavior

It's a lot easier to say "break them up!" and get a rise out of anyone who has any vague sense of having being slighted by said companies than actually defining specific behavior that should be criminalized. Because once the agitators put pen to paper and define the behavior, I bet it looks laughably innocuous.

So you will replace one lawsuit which they can 'out lawyer' with a slightly different lawsuit they can 'out lawyer'?

I am not seeing a winning strategy here.

INAL, but it seems to me that anti-trust litigation is far more complicated, costly and time consuming than passing a law that makes (for example) unauthorized data theft a crime.

What kind of teeth do you imagine would be required?

Fines that make such practices unprofitable and with repeated crimes, revoke their corporate charter.

Remember when Microsoft was broken up for trying to use their install footprint to strongarm the usage of the browser that came bundled with their operating system? Boy am I glad those days are over. Oh, wait...

In all seriousness, this doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Sure, maybe Facebook needs to be broken up but there are bigger fish.

Sometimes a small domino can knock down larger ones.

I mentioned this last time when the FTC refiled its complaint but the FTC still has a pretty tough case to prove here.

Among other points the core of the FTCs complaint states Facebooks market power dominance by stating its largest competitor is Snapchat. While not impossible I think it'll be tough to convince people that platforms like Twitter and TikTok operate in a completely different market than Facebook does while also saying that Snapchat is in that market.

Given that Meta’s stock hasn’t dropped, I’m willing to bet either this isn’t news or it poses no real threat to Meta.

Or it's possible the split up company doesn't have significantly lower market value than the monopoly company. Imagine a 25% non-monopoly discount and a 25% chance of being split up and that would only be a 6% drop in value.

That only holds true if the market is purely rational which it is not.

Conglomerates tend to be valued less than the sum-of-the-parts, getting control of conglomerates to spin off their businesses is a common active investing tactic. Breaking FB up is likely to unlock value for shareholders rather than hinder it. At least, short term as far as stock valuations go, a "markets are irrational" stance works in favor of this theory as it (the market) gets to speculate on every sub-business individually. Long term there are advantages to being under a single banner, like subsidizing Oculus growth and R&D through profits from the social medias to capture long term market share (like Amazon can subsidies retail with AWS, Alphabet can subsidies its "Other bets" with Search, etc).

I remember reading that in many cases total market cap goes up post-split.

It isn't much news (disclaimer: IANAL.)

Facebook had submitted a motion to dismiss the lawsuit. A motion to dismiss means they assume that every fact alleged by the FTC is true. You perform a motion to dismiss to say "even if everything they said is true, it still isn't even possible for them to win the lawsuit." The judge said, essentially, that if every fact the FTC alleges is true, then it is at least feasible that the FTC could have a successful lawsuit. There are two key things that this go ahead does NOT do:

1. It does not look at whether even a single alleged fact by the FTC is true

2. It does not mean that the FTC suit would be successful even if every fact is successfully proven

This is actually not really true?

> A motion to dismiss means they assume that every fact alleged by the FTC is true.

FB actually claims that every fact is false. The motion more means, that its so evident that the claim is false that it shouldn't be litigated. (eg. you wouldn't carry a trial claiming fb was a monopoly book-seller).

> The judge said, essentially, that if every fact the FTC alleges is true, then it is at least feasible that the FTC could have a successful lawsuit.

This is true. The judge said there was doubt over the truth of the FTC allegations, but those truths could be decided in court.

Specifically, questions over market definition (key to proving monopoly) were unproven and had significant doubts.The courts rejected the suit once already over these definitions, so this is a followup that adds details... but not much details.

> FB actually claims that every fact is false

They may, but the standard for deciding a motion to dismiss is to assume every fact actually in dispute is resolved against the moving party, if they would still prevail in that case, then their motion is granted.

(Note that there is a distinction that is easy to get tripped up on between “facts” and “conclusions of law asserted as if they were facts”, and it is not unheard of for a a motion to dismiss to center around the other party providing conclusions of law without supporting facts rather than actual facts.)

The deal that really reeked of buying the competition was WhatsApp, but since WhatsApp has very small market share in the US compared to iMessage I don't see how that can be an antitrust violation in the US. In the rest of the world it could be.

>Federal Trade Commission wants to force sale of Instagram and WhatsApp

Sale to whom? Google can pick up WhatsApp. They tried to buy it initially years ago.

Could be separate IPO (so a sale to the public)

Spinning out companies is pretty common. If anything, tech is the odd sector out in the US economy for still having conglomerates.

Almost all of the top level comments (5/8 at time of writing, and 1 of the other 3 is a reductio ad absurdum) are mainly just comparing this lawsuit to hypothetical ones against other companies. If I weren't at risk of getting flagged for spam, I'd reply to every one of them with the wikipedia link for Whataboutism. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

This case isn't any less valid because there are other possible cases that don't also exist.

This isn't whataboutism, this is questioning your sheriff why they used their limited resources to arrest a shoplifter but ignored a burglar. People are rightfully curious why the priorities seem off.

That is literally textbook definition of whataboutism

So is there no valid way to say "This is a waste of time and resources" ?

Saying an antitrust lawsuit against Meta is a waste of time and resources is a potentially valid argument. Saying it's a waste of time and resource unless they also go after Google or whoever is not.

Compared to doing not prosecuting anticompetitive behavior? Doubtful.

You just did! And this claim is very different to the claim above. If you wanted to argue in favour of this claim, something like the statement below would be convincing:

"The expected cost of prosecution is X, and expected benefit is Y. X >> Y"

Let’s break this down.. “Sheriff, you arrested the shoplifter, what about the burglar you let escape?”

Please explain how your example is not whataboutism.

Are you implying you would be against people in that city discussing why burglars are let free in favor of going after shoplifters?

At any rate, whataboutism is typically about pointing out the hypocrisy of the criticising party - e.g. 'how can the government criticise Facebook when they spy on their citizens so much themselves'.

Nobody says the case is invalid.

This is not Whataboutism. Have you carefully read the link you posted?

> Whataboutism - ... attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging hypocrisy

> Hypocrisy is the practice of engaging in the same behavior or activity for which one criticizes another or the practice of claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform.

Nobody is claiming the prosecution is "engaging in the same behavior", nor that the prosecution is "claiming to have moral standards or beliefs to which one's own behavior does not conform".

The claim is that there is a bigger fish out there, and people are pointing out, that the bigger fish would be a better expense of the taxpayer money. Perhaps they even consider scenario of dropping Facebook case right now and starting cases against Google and Apple to be more beneficial than following through with it.

Who says they haven't started cases against Google and Apple?

Prosecutors don't go immediately public when they start building cases, because that's a great way of letting the defendants know they need to start covering things up.

scrolled down too far to find this.

yes, google/visa/xxxx probably deserve their own discussion on the merits of breakup or regulation.

But that shouldn't be a primary reason why this specific discussion regarding Meta shouldn't take place.

(there may be other reasons why the meta breakup should/shouldn't happen, but handle those on their own merits)

What about Apple, Google and Microsoft? At least I can totally avoid Meta in my life, because their products are completely optional and have a ton of alternatives. But I simply cannot avoid Apple and Google because of their total monopoly on mobile phones. Break them up first.

This attempt would not work out the way it is expected, as the subjecture i.e. the user base would still stay mostly identical. It would be far better to strip Facebook and Meta out of for-profit status.

It would be pretty funny if Facebook was pried off of everything. And was just receded into the obscurity of MySpace.

I would totally jump back on WhatsApp if this happened

I think the antitrust issue is in the targeted digital ad market because FB has all of these products in the social networking space.

Its not.

Out of all the anti trust cases, this one feels like the least prepared and perhaps least warranted.

Facebook faces competition from Twitter, TikTok, Reddit, Twitch, YouTube, Discord, Steam, VRChat, dating apps, Netflix, etc. They deal in attention, and there are a lot of attention seeking companies. Even in the social networking space.

I'm not defending the company by any means. I'm just pointing out the landscape.

The companies most applicable to break up scrutiny are Google, Apple, and Amazon in precisely that order.

Google owns the web. They control search. The desktop and mobile browser space. Web standards. The ads marketplace. Google Play and the associated profits. They lock people into their ecosystem of store, messaging and productivity apps, and force competitors to play nice using this leverage, despite Android being "open source". They're trashing the quality of the web for profit maximization and extorting advertisers. They're trying to strong arm all of the web into a hosted AMP-like platform that Google serves and controls.

Apple owns 50% of the mobile market and keeps it under a tight grip with rules and taxes. They have a deep ecosystem of hardware and software that only plays nice with itself. They're anti-repairability, anti-portability, and treat their platform as a Berlin Walled dictatorship. They drag their feet on web standards and don't allow any edge for competition, meanwhile they grow into the payments, ads, healthcare and other spaces. They've grown a protected republic that is 50+% of domestic computing. If you launch a business on Apple, you'll owe them 30%, must play by their rules, can't build a customer relationship, and will probably wind up competing with them. And when Apple wants to compete with an offering a small company in their app store has, they ban or remove them. As much as we hate ads, they can destroy billion dollar businesses with simple policy changes, acting as a gravitational wave proportional to the scale of their business.

Both of these companies frequently get caught colluding on labor and anticompetitive pacts.

Amazon treats its sellers like shit and copies the ideas that work at scale. They horizontally integrated to the point that they run half the Internet, a major grocer and food retailer, consumer electronics, logistics and transportation, multiple film studios, video gaming, etc. There's nothing their hands aren't in, and due to economies of scale they can push anyone else over. If you host on AWS, they're offering deep discounts to their internal competitor. They're also turning all of open source into "free labor" for Amazon and using it as a tool for lock in.

Each of these companies could easily be split up. Amazon probably the easiest, because it's plainly obvious where most of the business divisions lie. They're into everything. Apple the most difficult - maybe forcing them to open up their platform and divest of media interests is a better action.

This wouldn't be about about destroying value. It's about making our economy robust and resilient. Giants are not conducive to that as they can price out actual economic activities and innovation.

FB / social media is a challenge to the power of the political parties / beuraucrats / media axis. The other industries you mention aren't. That's why they are doing this. Has nothing to do with helping you. In fact, if you work in tech, it's specifically designed to hurt you.

Perhaps the answer is to break all of them up. For those who truly believe that, out of practicality, we may not want to engage in whataboutism and go for whatever launch pad the world / legal landscape offers.

Need new Teddy Roosevelt

There's a lot of "whataboutism" happening in this thread.

How about our reaction to something like this is not "do more", but instead encouraging and be happy they are finally doing _anything_? Being negative will just make it seem like they shouldn't be doing anything.

thats probably because influencers/fanbois are trying to fix the conversation's overton window early on. give it time, usually high comment volume breaks out of it.

We should just break up all companies. One company - one product. Then we can end all of the hand wringing about how and why to divide. /s

Good luck deciding where the line between products is.

Is the Gmail spam filter a product, or part of Gmail? Is Gmail a product, or is GSuite the product?

Yes, exactly - my comment was in jest

It's ridiculous that the government is litigating this while ignoring the long standing monopolies that have been hurting consumers for decades. I would say it's also ridiculous that the government is putting the interests of advertisers over consumers, but that's not what they are doing. This is a transparent political maneuver by the bureaucrats in dc against the tech industry.

Sure, they’ve failed to do this a lot, but why discourage the government from doing this good thing just because they haven’t done it enough in the past?

Your last sentence is full of buzzwords. What is the mechanism behind that? What is their motivation? Why would “dc” care about Facebook? If your answer is somehow related to “the blob,” you probably need to do some actual reading on the theory and practice of monopoly enforcement in the United States.

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