Meta antitrust trial kicks off in federal court
axios.com
axios.com
Everyone knew at the time that Facebook bought Instagram because it threatened Facebook's dominance, and hindsight shows that exactly that happened. There's a huge swath of people that dropped off FB and now use Insta, but Meta owns both. It was a great move but it was absolutely anti-competitive at the time.
https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/report-facebook-hi...
[0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/slap-a-teacher-tiktok-challe...
https://archive.ph/ERLFo - Facebook paid Targeted Victory, a PR firm, to malign TikTok
https://archive.ph/wYuvL - A whistleblower’s power: Key takeaways from the Facebook Papers
https://archive.ph/rWDA4 - Mark Zuckerberg says TikTok is a threat to democracy, but didn't say he spent 6 months trying to buy its predecessor
https://archive.ph/H8SIk - Before Mark Zuckerberg Tried To Kill TikTok, He Wanted To Own It
https://archive.ph/liFKi - FACEBOOK’S PLAYBOOK TO BEAT COMPETITORS HAS HAD TO CHANGE WITH TIKTOK
https://archive.ph/9XSqi - Facebook Tries to Take Down TikTok
https://archive.ph/LWTHf - Reuters: Factbox: Facebook and TikTok's fraught history - quick look
https://archive.ph/H3dfJ - Facebook Parent Company Defends Its PR Campaign to Portray TikTok as Threat to American Children
Is that illegal? I don't understand! Every company that buys another company buys it because it adds something to their business. It's a ridiculous claim.
Whatsapp was purchased as a competition and therefore there’s a solid case for spitting the company along that line. Split off Instagram and things look even more competitive.
s/Meta/Instagram/
>it because it adds something to their business. It's a ridiculous claim.
"It" and "Something" are incredibly vague and meaningless. Their vacuousness is what allows you to not understand the illegal behavior.
If you weren't aware, it's actually legal to buy a competitor. It just has to pass antitrust review.
E.g. In 2006, the government approved Google acquisition of Youtube which competed with Google Video: https://www.google.com/search?q=google+2006+acquisition+yout...
Companies buy/merge competitors all the time that passes FTC legal review. E.g. Boeing acquired competitor McDonnell Douglas. Hewlett-Packard acquired Compaq Computer.
And sometimes US government encourages mergers. E.g. US asks stronger bank buy a weaker competitor bank. It's been leaked that the US Govt is encouraging competitors Intel and AMD to merge ... so the USA semiconductor industry can be stronger and thus, less dependent on Taiwan TSMC and stay ahead of China.
https://www.google.com/search?q=us+government+encouraging+in...
These are mergers that were allowed, but probably shouldn't have been because their industries were already quite consolidated by that point.
The ones that should be okay is when e.g. a company with 4% market share wants to buy a company with 0.5% market share. Companies merging when they each already have double digit percentages of the market is craziness.
> It's been leaked that the US Govt is encouraging competitors Intel and AMD to merge ... so the USA semiconductor industry can be stronger and thus, less dependent on Taiwan TSMC and stay ahead of China.
This sort of thinking is a demonstration of incompetence. AMD and Intel can both design competitive processors. AMD sold their fabs and now has the processors made by TSMC. Intel still makes them but their manufacturing process has fallen behind, to the point that they too have used TSMC to make some of their products. Saddling AMD with Intel's uncompetitive process would only put them both at a disadvantage against other competitors using TSMC.
The real problem here is that Intel was too vertically integrated and focused on producing only its own designs on its fabs, and then abandoned the low end of the market to sustain its margins. Which allowed TSMC to capture enough market share that the larger volume gave them enough capital to take the lead.
What the US needs is not mergers but the opposite -- its own TSMC as a competitive contract fab that can do the volumes needed to sustain a state of the art process.
The point is that they didn't acquire those companies to add to their business, they acquired them because their continued independent existence detracted from their business. Also known as competition.
I dislike meta but wouldnt call their ownership of instagram anti competitive monopolistic.
Kind of stinks of less than valid motivations based on the timing of bringing this up over a decade after the fact.
- If I’m the politician, then I need to keep the company on the edge until the end of the trial where I promise them to be acquitted;
- If I’m the CEO, I need the trial to go through and acquit me, because it guarantees me against future trials.
On substantially identical charges, where the principle of double jeopardy holds sway.
Not specifically related to this case, necessarily, but if you let an acquisition go through and discover a decade later that it was, in fact, anticompetitive (and intentionally so), presumably you would still try to break up the resulting monopoly, even if you didn’t predict it would happen?
A) that would be considered bad law now.
B) despite all branches of government going after Alcoa (Congress passing a special law to support the case mid way through), nothing happened upon remanding the case to the lower court due to the successful argument that other companies began competing
C) that would never happen now primarily due to only anticompetitive practices being scrutinized, not merely having the ability to control prices. But now I see where the confusion comes from, a 13 year saga in support of the Sherman Act
D) it’s so interesting how much the country changed solely from trying to differentiate itself from communism. So its gone to more of an extreme of private maximum extractable value.
if you impulsively steal something and get caught, you are not guilty of planning to steal something, but you are guilty of stealing it.
monopoly is the same.
In 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported that FTC officials in 2012 had concerns about the deal raising antitrust issues. However, they were apprehensive about potentially losing an antitrust case in court if they sued to block the deal.[2] If they would lose then on the merits of trying to enforce the Clayton Act, it would set a precedent that likely could not be undone.
[1] https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/facebook-instagram-deal-down-747m-...
[2] https://www.wsj.com/articles/tech-ceos-defend-operations-ahe...
But before 2013 there were methods on both iOS and Android for an App to get a list of all OTHER installed apps on the device.
Facebook had the means to know exactly at which rate each app was growing and how many of the users they have to share with it, the facebook app itself was gathering this info.
They could gather enough data to even calculate how much user-attention they lose after each app is installed on a users' device.
--
Onavo was then acquired in 2013, right when Apple started to lock-down those app-scanning methods with iOS7.
So it appears that the company was acquired to be able to KEEP doing something they have already been doing before that with the facebook app.
They could argue that the decision was made based on declarations that did not align with the private conversation that Zuckerberg had at the time, as those emails came out since.
To anyone on the side of anti-trust, it was clear even without that email as to how much Instagram and WhatsApp were growing, and thus Facebook was Standard Oiling.
Also the FTC is not exactly known for enforcing antitrust law very strictly.
Hell, even I wasn't this cynical back in those days. I was shocked as late as 2018 when Facebook began using SMS phone numbers for advertising, something they'd promised not to do (for obvious reasons.) https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-said-to-use-peoples-ph...
I almost had one once, some time in the very early 2010s. After first login, the first prompt I saw was for my email account's authentication details, so that Facebook could "find my contacts for me."
I forget the exact language they used, but I know a boundary test when I see one, and I completed neither that nor any other further onboarding step, but immediately "deleted" the account - understanding this would not actually remove any information, but would deny me at least the temptation to develop what I could see would become a dangerous habit.
I don't exactly think I blame people who were slower to catch on, which is a relief, considering that appears at one time or another to have been about half the species and it would be a lot of work. But I would incline much less to say that mistrusting Facebook as early as 2018 would have been cynical, than that still to have trusted them so late seems remarkably naïve.
They were busy doing things like bringing freedom and democracy to Afghanistan, having a financial crisis, stuff like that. Very important stuff. Social media? Oh yes I think my grandson told me about that.
Also "tiny 1 billion dollar acquisition" is not how I'd characterize what was the largest acquisition FB had made up to that point: https://archive.nytimes.com/dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/04/09/...
> Though Facebook is known for smaller acquisitions, Instagram’s surging momentum likely compelled the social network to swiftly put together a billion-dollar offer.
Google rise makes less sense but their position as king of search seems even more concrete than ever before (although LLMs might threaten that if they don't stay competitive I guess).
Source: https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/2012?amount=10000...
Now? That would be a small preseed round.
https://www.techemails.com/p/mark-zuckerberg-instagram-fours...
That plus scary TOS changes Instagram did immediately after acquisition
They knew photos tracked better in news feeds
Also they new users don’t like to switch and get new followers
See Bluesky now. Hard to move even 1000 followers
If there are 3 different grocery stores and two of them merge, though? That's a different matter.
And if 1 of the remaining 2 is the zero-waste organic store that only rich people and hippies use? It might not even be providing all that much competition.
This implies that mergers between large services that have a network effect should always be prohibited, but why is that even a problem unless your goal is to thwart competition?
It would also create a useful incentive: Federated systems (like email) have a single network that spans entities. If Microsoft wants to buy Hotmail, they're not buying a separate network so you don't have to be worried about it even if they each have 25 million users as long as that's not too large a percentage of the billion people who use email. So then companies would want to participate in federated systems instead of creating silos like modern social networks do, because then they would be as strictly prohibited from doing mergers.
Seems like in your analogy there were plenty of grocery stores left.
People forget that the Android app and the aquisition announcement came out like one week apart. The basic web version didn't come out until half a year later.
My point is it already had a solid rich, influencer-y userbase + was about to become available on more platforms. Aquisition definitely had an impact on the user growth, but the growth itself was already inevitable.
Antitrust violations are a higher bar, you must improperly flex your dominant market position to violate the law. For that the government would have to show that FB offered an unreasonable price that nobody sane would match or that they threatened to cut off Insta links from FB if they didn't sell, something like that.
> Last year, documents for a standalone Facebook mobile photo sharing app were attained by TechCrunch. Now it seems Facebook would rather buy Instagram which comes with a built-in community of photographers and photo lovers, while simultaneously squashing a threat to its dominance in photo sharing.
This is something that people can claim to know from hindsight. When Facebook acquired it, Instagram was a photo sharing app that had 13 employees.
(WhatsApp only had, like, 50 employees when FB bought it for $19B, as a bit of evidence that headcount isn’t necessarily a measure of value.)
I believe intention and behaviour matters much more to antitrust than simply continuing to be a dominant market leader by smartly staying on top of what the public wants. Google search doing horizontal integration into Android and Chrome to cut off competition's market entry points at lower levels is far more plausible antitrust narrative IMO.
Since it didn't happen it's pretty moot to the discussion. M&As with massive market consolidation like that get challenged all the time in courts so it's hard to say what would have happened then.
FTC investigated the Instagram purchase in 2012 and chose not to interfere.
So failed acquisition doesn't make buying Instagram inherently an anticompetitive move, just maybe can be spun as their strategy at the time, but a decade later the market still has plenty of players so it will be a tough case to make. Although even a failed case gives the government leverage over Meta with threats of future ones so they might not care.
The FTC investigation specifically had a condition that they would reevaluate the acquisition in coming years. This was widely expected to be done, and everyone knew about it at the time of the acquisition.
I'm more concerned with YouTube owning all of social video. Movies are on a dozen streamers. Social stuff is on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, and X. But video essays, independent animation, educational content, cultural critiques, music, video podcasts, trailers, gameplay, research, news - anything long form, serious, interesting - it's all trapped on YouTube as the only distribution platform. And they'll keep getting bigger with no possible alternative due to network effects.
I'm even more concerned with Amazon being a conglomerate [1] that is in online sales, hyperscaler infrastructure, consumer hardware, home automation systems, grocery stores, medicine, primary care, and movie production. And that they can leverage these synergies in grossly unfair ways.
I'm most concerned that the Apple / Google duopoly in mobile, web, and search has entrenched these two players across the vast majority of online transactions, interactions, and computational device usages. They collect margin on everything. They own your devices, they own search, they own the web, they own the apps, they have to be paid off to rank your business, have to be paid off to collect money, they regulate what you can do with your apps and websites, etc. etc. You jump through their hoops. This is their internet.
[1] Especially given the fact that Amazon can subsidize their efforts in these areas from profits in other business units and out-compete viable businesses in those markets. They can offer goods for free with an existing subscription and advertise far and wide across their retail website, plastered on their packaging, and emblazoned on the side of their delivery vehicles. Lord of the Rings got an 80 million dollar advertising package for free, whereas Bong Joon Ho's far more deserving film got next to nothing.
I think everybody on hackernews gets it. We're all pretty much on the same page.
Ain't nobody able to do anything about it though.
it is concern for someone outside western hemisphere, in Asia especially META dominance is even stronger
Yes, but: despite all of us adblocking them, this is all supported by their ad revenue.
The discovery effect is simply too powerful. I can't really see a way out of this because people are not going to go back to paying for media. Possibly the only way is something like the increasing control of social media from the EU forcing a separate EU Youtube, which might include things like the French TV rules forcing a certain amount of content to be in French, plus control over foreign disinformation influencers.
(you know what the only other social video platforms are with millions of users? Bilibili, xiaohungshu etc.)
The top reply to the top comment has some useful quotes for the purposes of this discussion...
> This is not going to be one of the best tech acquisitions of the next decade.
> Instagram is a photo service in a sea of other photo services.
> Bookmark this comment. See you in 2022.
Heh.
How about Google People? [1]
https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/introducing-google-b...
1. bullish 2. bullish 3. neutral 4. neutral 5. neutral 6. neutral 7. bullish 8. bearish 9. bearish 10. neutral
Of the top top-level comments, you have to go all the way to #8 to find a bearish comment.
Replies to the top comment are more bearish because they're directly responding to a bullish sentiment.
- Larrys 2012
This case is particularly wrong, as that iPod quote is from Slashdot. HN didn’t even exist in 2001.
https://slashdot.org/story/01/10/23/1816257/apple-releases-i...
FaceBook was literally collecting data on what apps people were using on their phones and empirically saw the rise of Instagram. Of course the rise of Instagram didn't need to continue but that's why you buy all the realistic competitors so even if most of them fail you have a moat of dead companies.
We don't seem to spend half as much energy taking major news outlets to task when they similarly guess wrong, unless we feel that somehow adding a question mark negates any responsibility (i.e. "The Ouya will revolutionize gaming" vs. "Will the Ouya revolutionize gaming?").
The top comment compares it to YouTube as a great acquisition.
If everyone knew, why was the purchase allowed?
Not sure anyone thinks thats true at all.
The actual simple photo sharing site was Flickr.
Instagram was seen from the start as a SNS with photo sharing as a pretense. The other SNS were already photo centric either way.
“There are network effects around social products and a finite number of different social mechanics to invent. Once someone wins at a specific mechanic, it’s difficult for others to supplant them without doing something different.”
“One way of looking at this is that what we’re really buying is time. Even if some new competitors springs up, buying Instagram, Path, Foursquare, etc now will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get close to their scale again. Within that time, if we incorporate the social mechanics they were using, those new products won’t get much traction since we’ll already have their mechanics deployed at scale.”
Forty-five minutes later:
“I didn’t mean to imply that we’d be buying them to prevent them from competing with us in any way,”
Isn't what matters in the end is whether there is still an effective market left as a result?
It seems that Mark himself is arguing that by the nature of the network effects of social media, first movers have a natural monopoly advantage that's hard to break.
The regulators should be focusing on that - ie enforcing rules which limit the monopoly advantage due to network effects.
Take the telecomms space - if somebody got first mover on a phone system and it wasn't interoperable with any others - then once established they would have a monopoly. The way you break that is to force interoperability - not allow companies to use access to the network as a competition barrier.
An example in the Meta space - as far as I can tell it was not possible for me to send a message to somebody in Whatsapp without going via whatsapp - ie there is no network access from a different app.
This appears to be exactly what the EU is focussed on - enforcing interop.
https://engineering.fb.com/2024/03/06/security/whatsapp-mess... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Markets_Act
Sure, but it was a serious threat to Facebook with hordes of especially younger people moving away from FB in favor of more activity on Instagram, which at that time had evolved from "just" a photo making/sharing app to a social network.
Any one of them could have taken off and eaten facebook's lunch. Instagram was the winner in a sea of camera apps because facebook threw unlimited resources into the hip app of the moment.
Facebook knew what it was doing and the emails plainly reflect that
And growing quickly, so:
> In his opening remarks, Mr. Matheson mentioned documents, including what he described as a “smoking gun” February 2012 email in which Mr. Zuckerberg discussed the rise of Instagram and the importance of “neutralizing a potential competitor.” In another email, in November 2012 to Ms. Sandberg, the chief operating officer at the time, Mr. Zuckerberg wrote, “Messenger isn’t beating WhatsApp, Instagram was growing so much faster than us that we had to buy them for $1 billion.”
> The F.T.C. showed Mr. Zuckerberg a 2011 email in which he wrote, “We really need to get our act together quickly on this since Instagram is growing so fast.”
* https://archive.is/https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/techno...
> It’s a combination of neutralizing a competitor and improving Facebook, Zuckerberg said in a reply. “There are network effects around social products and a finite number of different social mechanics to invent. Once someone wins at a specific mechanic, it’s difficult for others to supplant them without doing something different.”
> Zuckerberg continued: “One way of looking at this is that what we’re really buying is time. Even if some new competitors springs up, buying Instagram, Path, Foursquare, etc now will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get close to their scale again. Within that time, if we incorporate the social mechanics they were using, those new products won’t get much traction since we’ll already have their mechanics deployed at scale.”
> Forty-five minutes later, Zuckerberg sent a carefully worded clarification to his earlier, looser remarks.
> “I didn’t mean to imply that we’d be buying them to prevent them from competing with us in any way,” he wrote.
* https://www.theverge.com/2020/7/29/21345723/facebook-instagr...
If a company, which had 13 employees at the time of acquisition and was ~2 years old, can be a legitimate threat to Facebook (which it was), then how strong is your monopoly, really?
For context, we've seen this play out multiple times in the last decade: with Snapchat to some degree but now, more importantly, with Tiktok.
Many consider Facebook a relic for old people. IG is rapidly meeting the same fate. It seems to be way more popular with millenials than Zoomers (anecdotally).
My point is that when the cost of user switching to a new platform is as simple as downloading a new app and creating a new login, then your "monopoly" lacks the traditional moat or barrier to entry that antitrust is specifically designed to fight.
Put another way: this just isn't as urgent as people are making it out to be and (IMHO) it's merely a shakedown by the current administration to get Meta to fall in line with censoring topics that the administration doesn't like.
Innovation can't happen without Facebook's say-so, that's the monopoly, and over way too many people.
What is more significant is what Meta did since then.
I do think Meta didn't see simply a photo sharing app, they saw another social graph they could ingest. They did this quite successfully.
> Integrating their products with ours to improve the service is also a factor. But in reality, we already know these companies’ social mechanics, and we will integrate them over the next 12–24 months anyway. The integration plan involves building their mechanics into our products rather than directly integrating their products, if that makes sense, by a combination of these two things: neutralizing a potential competitor, integrating their products with ours to improve the service.
> One way of looking at this is that what we’re really buying is time. Even if some new competitor springs up buying Instagram, Path, Foursquare, et cetera, now will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get close to their scale again. Within that time, if we incorporate the social mechanics they are using, those new products won’t get much traction because we will already have their mechanics deployed at scale.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/technology/meta-antitrust... (https://archive.ph/8wOPP)
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/14/media/meta-ftc-trial/index.ht...
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/13/meta-zuckerberg-ftc...
(I've omitted the HN links this time because there weren't any comments yet. Someday we're going to do proper URL bundling and karma sharing for cases like this, where multiple submitters post good articles on the same underlying story.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders
The leaderboard system is interesting because they don’t actually show numbers for the top 10(to de-incentivize farming battles I assume).
If you look at the top profile, tptacek, you can see they have a little over 400k karma and they are active(posted two days ago).
Thanks to Thomas people like him who make this site fun!
A jury however found that the relevant market in the Epic v. Google case was just Android. Google is understandably appealing that to the 9th Circuit.
Many things have been established.
It’s not fine to do them to create, expand, protect, attempt to create, etc. monopolies.
So essentially, you can be anti-competitive only to the point where you’ve been too successful at it, then it’s bad.
Usually due to either a monopsony/cartel/monopoly which controls most of the market doing it successfully.
If the companies in the lower 5% of a market price fix or the like, no one usually cares. Even 20%, usually.
The Sherman antitrust act speaks about ‘restraints of trade’ because it has to actually restrain trade, which requires a significant degree of control - which a successful/actual monopoly, monopsony, or cartel can do.
Technically, even attempting to do it is illegal, but going after every company that tries has a bit of the same feel as locking up every single toddler because they took a swing at someone or threatened them with their cute little stubby kid scissors.
It’s a waste of resources, not in anyone’s interest, stops behavior most people would consider necessary/healthy to some degree, causes much worse problems than it solves, etc.
On the other hand, locking up a successful serial killer is just good public policy.
The difference between the two is more a matter of the success and effectiveness of their tactics, not really intent.
You can read more about initial complaint and following the trial here: https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/zuckerberg-on-the-stand-the...
Another purpose of acquisitions is to acquire a new capability that you could not do in house that you do not already compete on.
I don't think any social media consumer is lacking choice.
The question of whether society should allow companies to perform anti-competitive actions should not be “will we be left with enough choices?”, but should be “is this an anti-competitive action?”
No, it's not. It is not normal or usual. Not even in the tech industry.
"Did Microsoft sell Windows at a loss?"
Now you don't have to define the market. Microsoft did it for you.
I do struggle to understand how we here casually lump tohether totally different platforms as comptetitors.
It’s not like I can use Youtube or Tiktok instead of Whatsapp with my family for direct and group discussion. Even X and Instagram would be a stretch, as their raison d’être is public social media and not instant messaging.
Sure the platforms have overlapping features, but you ain’t gonna use a knife insted of a spoon.
Like X isn't competing with FB Marketplace but Craigslist sure is. TikTok isn't competing with FB Events but Apple Events and Eventbrite are.
It even has E2EE, as long as people use the same client (or a compatible one).
Out of corporate contexts, email is only used to register for services, newsletters, and recover passwords. It's a shame, I prefer email over messaging for anything non-urgent.
What's wrong with Signal? Or, worst-case scenario, Telegram?
But this doesn't stop people from migrating their private interactions away from WhatsApp/Meta, by using using -as an example- Signal as their replacement app of choice where they can. The frictional cost of keeping WhatsApp for business interaction, and Signal for private interaction is fairly close to zero.
IMO from a technical perspective nothing but more of how do you get your entire network to migrate from one chat app to another. Everyone here says just get your parents, siblings, friends to switch but it's far more complicated than that.
My wife is from Brazil and uses WA all the time. Getting her to switch would mean getting her entire network of family and friends to switch and you would have to make that pitch to everyone in the "network". All of a sudden it goes from getting a few people to switch to getting literally thousands to switch which is next to impossible.
But what will it change for users? you'll still be stuck with What's app, except that it won't be owned by Meta.
This has a potentially very-chilling effect on acquisitions, which are a major source of liquidity for lots of secondary companies.
The hardest part of competing with encumbants, especially when it comes to stuff like social media and IM, is acquiring users, due to those coveted network effects. When you look at what happened with Discord, it was able to swoop in when there was somewhat of a vacuum building with Microsoft-owned Skype being completely shit, MSN and AIM falling way out of fashion, and IRC... continuing to be IRC. Then they took advantage of something relatively new; they could lower the barrier to entry. Most existing IM networks required you to download a client to really use it, but Discord, just being a web app, you could log in from a browser and get the full experience. And if you needed to jump in quickly, you could literally just enter a name and start using it immediately, at least in the early days.
That doesn't happen often. What usually happens is the company that acquires the software makes use of the asset they actually care about (the users they just paid for) and now they don't have to do all of that hard work of actually acquiring the users by making a better product and marketing it. (Nevermind that they're almost certainly better-resourced to do that than the company that they are acquiring.) A large minority of users are very unhappy with the enshittification of the service, but most users don't really care much since they are pretty casual and a lot of them may not have even known things to be much better anyways. Microsoft squandering Skype seems to be the result of a lot of things at once, ranging from incompetence to the complexity that the P2P nature of Skype brought with it (at least early on.)
For example, look at Twitter. Elon Musk could do basically anything wrong but it has such a long history and so many users that it really is hard to squander it entirely, even after making many grossly unpopular moves. Don't get me wrong, Mastodon and Bluesky are doing fine, and it's also fine that neither of them are likely to ever really take over the number one spot in their niche; they still function just fine. But Twitter will always be the place where basically everything happens among them, even if the people who care the most absolutely hate the shit out of it.
I wish more acquisitions did go like Skype, only much faster.
I think the reason this gets ignored is because there's too many people on a certain part of the political spectrum where they see covid censorship as a nothingburger when actually it was a massive problem and whatever else people think of Elon I don't think you can take away from him that the situation was intolerable
Instagram had less than a tenth of its current user base when it was bought [1].
The point of many of those companies is to get bought out and then get enshitified or stripped for its IP and integrated into for profit products.
Discord is very much in the same boat of build user base, then either sell or lock people in and charge a lot. It's current model is unsustainable. It will get bought out or enshitify eventually, there's no other sustainable model unless every user starts handing them money every month like its Netflix.
People here used to know this, are we getting an eternal September? Comments are getting more and more "reddit" like.
What?! I do know this, and take great offense to the insinuation that my comment is "reddit"-like. I didn't feel it necessary to iterate over how VCware works since, as you said, everyone already gets that part.
Anyway, the "this place is getting more like Reddit by the day" thing has been a Hacker News staple for (well) over a decade too. Check the end of the HN guidelines, you'll have a chuckle.
As I understand, the complaint was that things get ruined once acquired. Great, we all know that it's in part because of unsustainable business models in the hope of getting acquired*. Does that mean we have to like it? Wouldn't it be nice to encourage companies to have sustainable business models?
*But also not entirely. Even if you build a sustainable business model, for you it's throwing off profit and that's gravy for you. But once someone buys it from you, suddenly they are in the hole and have an investment to recoup, especially if they overpaid. And so the temptation arises to goose things to pay back that investment more quickly
That's also what HN said about Uber and many other services still running today, including old Twitter.
I haven't looked at their financials, but I wouldn't be surprised if their current subscription offerings targeting power users were enough to support the service.
(Saying this without judging it as bad or good, simply how it is)
User retention aside... Nobody can even find the small internet. It's out there and there are search engines, but even if Google magically wasn't utterly ruined by SEO SPAM, people just don't Google their special interests as much directly anymore. (I can tell from search analytics!) So aside from a struggle to keep users engaged in small communities, there's also not very many users entering smaller communities either, certainly not enough to counteract the bleed.
This has been my lived experience with a few places the past couple of years, and I love it. It's a completely different experience from the "pop web" that most people use and it's amazing.
>Nobody can even find the small internet. It's out there and there are search engines, but even if Google magically wasn't utterly ruined by SEO SPAM, people just don't Google their special interests as much directly anymore.
I know that my example can't speak for most/many other places, but the regional hiking forums I frequent (same places I alluded to above) come up a lot on search engines. Whether you're looking for "[region] hiking", or looking up "[name of] trail", or anything related to it, the pages pop up towards the top quite frequently. It's how I found them, and there does seem to be a steady number of new users joining.
There's something to be said, at least in my opinion, about keeping a healthy dose of ephemerality in our lives.
Even if a new protocol was created which fixed this, the necessary design change would bring so much baggage that it would become Matrix. To solve the unstable endpoint problem, servers need to store messages until all endpoints retrieve them (which is never, for channels of non-trivial size, since at least one client isn't coming back) or time out (how long do you set that? a week? If you're holding all messages permanently, you might as well never time out clients).
The obvious storage design will hold each channel's messages once, not once per client connection buffer. Which means a lot of things: you might as well send it to new clients when they join; each message will have an ID so you might as well support replies and emoji reactions; you have to moderate it for illegal content; since messages have IDs, you might as well retract moderated messages on clients. At the end of the design process, what you have is nothing like IRC any more.
The lack of connection is the point.
OP lamented that things like IRC meant that if you weren't always connected, you'd miss messages.
I simply posited, from a philosophical perspective rather than the technical perspective you are focused on, that it's OK for us to not be connected all the time. That not everything we miss is as important as we feel it might be when we think about missing out. That the truly important details will make their way to us one way or another.
Again, I know this. And please don't mis-quote OP, they clearly said "miss", just like I said.
I've told you twice, now, that you're focusing so much on the technical aspect of a connection that you are completely missing the philosophical idea I have very clearly, also twice, suggested. How IRC works, on mobile and on desktop, is not the point. I don't know how else to explain myself, so I'm gonna move on. Hope you have a pleasant day.
Edit: For posterity's sake, OP's quote at the time of this this post is...
>... if you have a connection interruption you miss messages.
I think maybe everyone should adjust their definition of success to include treating users fairly long term instead of milking them over prolonged enshittification periods.
https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/users-call-for-discord...
I don’t buy it. An independent Instagram would have both been another potential acquirer and a pocketful of cash for investors who might fund another round.
Disclaimer: Matt Stoller is big on anti monopoly so he's in support of government in both cases but overall, his coverage is really good and more details than you will probably get from other outlets.
I know the company is quite unpopular, but from an objective legal standpoint I don't see how you can make an antitrust/anticompetitive argument here.
If the relevant market ends up including TikTok or YouTube, FTC will be unable to make that showing.
But you are right, in a way the FTC is appealing their own decision [1]. US politics can be quite mad at times.
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2012/08/...
No question about the truth of that statement.
However, though the FTC approved the acquisition 10 years ago, the current FTC commissioners have evidently concluded that in the interim things have changed. Whether the court agrees with the FTC's logic remains to be seen.
Efficiency? The people at the FTC reviewing mergers can't be experts of every corner of the economy, but if they catch an illegal merger during the approval process it can be blocked early without having to go to court.
An illegal merger is illegal no matter what. It's the corporation's responsibility to not break the law.
> The point is about why it's acceptable for the FTC to approve something, and then years later come back and change the decision.
I addressed that in my comment (it was the entire point of my comment, actually)
Indeed there is a huge number of successful messaging apps (imessage, signal, telegram, wire, wechat, kakao) and social networks (tiktok, snapchat, linkedin, reddit)
I know we're supposed to hate on facebook but what exactly is anti competitive?
Willing to listen to other opinions on other companies, but surely Whatsapp
Psych, it wasn't legally binding.
Oh wait, I forgot those arguments only apply when companies are getting the government to go after people sharing files
If I recall correctly, I gave them a worldwide, perpetual license to some data.
> if you can prove you suffered monetary damages
This is a separate question (that of calculating damages) from that of whether there was a breach per se.
However, even in 2012 or so when these acquisitions happened, Snapchat was a much bigger thing. And for me, Reddit was a much bigger thing than FB.
I think amongst the antitrust trials, this one is the weakest.
Legal proceedings focused on "social networks" and "browser market shares" and app stores. These are ridiculous, superficial, and meaningless.
If there was really such a thing as a monopoly on social networking, you would have to kick people off the networks, not just stop the companies operating them. What would change if instagram had to become its own company again? The same people would own it. And that is why antitrust is a joke, it does not prevent the true monopoly of who controls what.
I hope Mark issues a public statement that he is dropping his emergency arbitration against her and will allow her book to Publish. I get why he did it, but it didn't work and now it is hurting more than helping. There is no such thing as Bad PR --but an open wound is a different story. (I am on his side in that I don't neurotically hold people accountable for being dbags back in their 20s and early 30s when they aren't that person anymore...google for "brain development at 30" to see why.)
PS: Was at a startup that was wiped out by Instagram 4.3. This was after Mr. SnapEgo reportedly turned down a cool $1B and McAfee's lost son snapped up the technically troubled Vine (that Mr. FootInHisMouth should probably retool and rebrand as "X Prime").
Seriously though, Billy was a FB investor (in addition to apparently being a Sith Lord who may have seen an Anakin-echo in youngling Zuck) and it's assumed he didExert influence during the dark period. It must have been intense for Zuck. Can only hope such influence faded with the Epstein scandal, but it's too late for Mark to stay in control of Meta now anyway, unfortunately you have to take the Bad with the Good. Mark's problem now is he's too young to retire and he really, it's not like he can spin-off with Reality Labs and keep going on the Orion stuff --without leadership, that market isLost to Apple now (though Apple's entire C-suite is aging out and since Elon is not available anymore..heh yeah: Zuck, the next CEO of AAPL --halfway callin' it.)
You mean "Careless People?" It looks like it's on Amazon.
It's very sad. She reported to Congress that she faces a $50K per disparagement penalty. Let's say there are 25 disparagements in the book and it sells 100K copies into the Billion+ FB user community. As she pointed out to Congress, a disparagement is a truth. $5B for telling truths from seven or eight years ago.
These are usually a severance thing and not a term of employment. Some employers are extra clever and make the contract secret and the arbitration secret, so the public has no idea anything even happened.
1. Everything is for sale. Any laws, tariffs, regulations, etc that negatively affect your interests can be bought off. Pardons can be sold. Thanks for the Supreme Court, there is absolutely nothing illegal about the President doing this anymore; and
2. The courts are used to bend individuals and companies to the policy and personal interests of the president. Take Eric Adams's corruption case. The DoJ wanted to dismiss the case without prejudice so it could be re-filed. This threat of future prosecution was the point to keep Adams in line. The courts saw through this thinly-veiled influence peddling and dismissed the case with prejudice.
So Meta is being forced to kiss the ring. That means silencing content critical of the administration and allowing right-wing conspiracies and hate speech to spread unfettered.
I expect nothing to come of this because these cases all take a decade or more to filter through various appeals, remands back to the trial court, further appeals and so on. But it will absolutely influence how Meta's recommendation algorithms work.
“Your worst sin is that you have destroyed and betrayed yourself for nothing.”
― Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment.
Giving Trump money appears to be a game for suckers.
Same for WhatsApp
Both companies had amazing founders who could have thrived if Facebook didn’t take them out
We would have a tech landscape of two independent companies and “meta” being just another Yahoo or MySpace
Facebook didn’t innovate it crushed innovation.
Fuck them and I hope Trump scewers Zuck
Do you really want to live in a universe where Trump has his hands wrapped around the necks of the media and the press?
What sort of quid-pro-quo do you think he would get in exchange for not squeezing?
If you have any delusions that this can turn out well look at what happened with Eric Adams.
If anything, he was kissing Trump's ass because he knew it was about to reach trial. The date was known since November.
https://www.semafor.com/article/04/14/2025/trump-officials-s...
Roko's Basilisk might be hitting us faster than we thought.
[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/09/myanmar-faceb...
That parenthetical addition is a bit harsh!
What matters is: if Donald Trump wants to break up Meta just for fun, nothing can stop him and he will do it. Just for fun