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Comment by bearjaws | Hacker News Reader

Why is a fine even an acceptable resolution?

Previously the FTC had been running such that, if it could not prove an acquisition was bad it would approve it.

In this case, back in 2012 Instagram was small, didn't charge money, and not considered a competitor to Facebook.

Well, we sure as hell know now it was a bad idea. Harmed consumer privacy, removed other competitors, and expanded the network effect of then Facebook.

And before anyone says "oh what about YouTube, X, TikTok, competitors" - Yes they should all be split off from their parent companies too.

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My favorite was that the deal was where Facebook agreed not to import IG into FB. They have merged the two together so much so that if Facebook has a complete outage, so does IG. Not only that, but Facebook "magically" knows when I'm on IG and vice versa.

Also I think if you sign up for Instagram you get Threads lol

Nice account you got there, would be a shame if you deleted Threads and also deletes your Insta

But on my Android I got no Threads. True, IG tries their best to convince me to install it. Maybe I don't have it because my IG was created before times?

Much like when a company is acquired and the execs of the acquisition assure everyone that nothing is going to change.

Until it inevitably and drastically does because those execs no longer have any real power even if they weren’t explicitly lying.

Oh yeah, lots of "First Time?" meme opportunities during acquisition.

>deal was where Facebook agreed not to import IG into FB

What deal was this?

This was for WhatsApp

> They have merged the two together so much so that if Facebook has a complete outage, so does IG.

If AWS has a complete outage, so do many completely unrelated businesses. As a regulator, "running on the same infrastructure" would be the least of my worries and an acceptable carve-out for a "no integration" clause.

Running on separate infrastructure makes it a lot easier to confirm for an auditor, that data is not being merged or used in combination though.

And now I’ve noticed threads permeate IG to cross-pollinate.

Also, Facebook/Meta said they would not be able to link WhatsApp accounts to facebook accounts. After they were allowed to buy WhatsApp they unsurprisingly began using metadata for things like knowing who Facebook users are talking to.

They paid some fines that they show no sign of caring about.

I don't think the people running the FTC care what happens so long as they land a huge sum of money to satisfy their boss. I suspect the FTC is not long for this world anyway and after this, it'll be a much more direct threat. Maybe I'm too paranoid and pessimistic, but a year ago that wouldn't even have been a consideration. Now, it's a possibility.

The FTC signed off on the acquisition.

Now they have third party buyers remorse.

This anti-big-tech hysteria in the US is dangerous. Applying early 20th antitrust thinking to modern tech companies is short sighted and doesn't show the whole picture. These American big tech companies that people like Steve Bannon and Lina Khan want to split up have been responsible for not only the impressive US GDP and wealth recovery and growth since the 2008 financial crisis but also for much of the rest of the world's wealth recovery and growth since the 2008 crisis.

Danish pension funds have 25% allocation on US stocks but ~70% of the total returns in 2022-2024 came from US stocks with big tech companies leading the charge.

"monopolies are good because line goes up"

>monopolies

Where exactly? They lose market share to every new AI wrapper app and most young people are on the Chinese video app.

>are good because line goes up

The "line goes up" sarcasm really doesn't work when we are actually suddenly in a "line goes down" situation and it clearly sucks.

The line going down is just a return to reality hopefully. So many vastly over valued tech stocks and tech adjacent stocks.

Inequality is growing massively, it is also not necessarily the best use of capital, whilst this growth may be big, if it were not so concentrated it would likely be even larger. Concentration of capital leads to inefficiency, a small but relevant example, large mansions and super yachts. The marginal propensity to consume also needs to be considered, we live in a demand driven world.

Indeed. I'd argue that failing to apply robust antitrust enforcement (as the US hasn't in the last 20 years) is short-sighted.

It creates monolithic companies that are enormously profitable at the cost of innovation.

Fewer huge companies will never innovate as quickly as a diverse and competitive ecosystem, especially when the cost to develop and deliver is minimal.

Seen another way, the current Big Tech landscape creates artificial barriers that limit startups' access to customers compared to what the internet and mobile previously enabled.

> Fewer huge companies will never innovate as quickly as a diverse and competitive ecosystem, especially when the cost to develop and deliver is minimal.

It's not clear that this is true. Facebook produces a load of stuff out of its R&D budget that wouldn't be possible in 100 smaller companies.

I'd respectfully disagree.

The advantages of monolithic R&D driven by a profit engine are (1) funding scale & (2) longer-term planning.

The disadvantages are (3) leadership tunnel-vision (e.g. $$$$ to build the shittiest metaverse) & (4) political inertia (e.g. greenfield R&D being subject to high-level BigCo political jockeying, like Microsoft's killing anything internal that threatened Windows/Office revenue).

It's far from all-positive, and debatably less effective than making a larger number of more diverse bets and then letting customers decide which is best.

E.g. Facebook never would have created something as alien as TikTok

I'm not saying it's all positive. I'm countering something that says it's all negative. And TikTok is more like Facebook than a small startup.

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