Posted by ianrahman 4/15/2025
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.
Until it inevitably and drastically does because those execs no longer have any real power even if they weren’t explicitly lying.
What deal was this?
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.
Nice account you got there, would be a shame if you deleted Threads and also deletes your Insta
They paid some fines that they show no sign of caring about.
Now they have third party buyers remorse.
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.
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.
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.
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
For the same reason that Microsoft of yore would have never considered Office-online. (Why would anyone want a word processor on the web?)
Institutional blind spots are dangerous.
Some Norwegians are starting to be concerned but only because they think Trump will seize their assets.
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.
No it still works, because "but make a lot of money!" is _never_ an acceptable argument for anything. It may be a supplemental argument, but you need something else to be the foundation. Making a lot of money doesn't explain why something is good or why we should do it over other things.
I mean, we can make a lot of money through theft, or selling tobacco, maybe legalizing heroin. But those things are bad.
I wouldn't be surprised if a certain amount was offered through backchannels to his family, and someway, somehow, Trump didn't have the influence over this case like was expected.
With hundreds of millions at stake I would be very surprised if they weren't doing this and more.
This is why Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta have all been targeted first, before building a huge case for Microsoft.
Again, it won't be easy as the FTC and the DOJ have failed to break Microsoft up many times.
In this hypothetical scenario:
1. Instagram competes with TikTok, winning a minority share of the market.
2. The government decrees that TikTok is anathema and expels them from the market.
3. The government sues Instagram for having a supermajority share of the remaining market.
I feel like there should be a form of estoppel preventing the argument.
Agreed. Alas, our SCOTUS would never limit themselves in that way.