Oh that&#x27;s awesome. I haven&#x27;t been able to pry my family away from those two, even though they openly admit that Facebook is evil&#x2F;sucks.

Unfortunately, after skimming through the PDF of the complaint (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;system&#x2F;files&#x2F;documents&#x2F;cases&#x2F;1910134fbcomplaint.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;system&#x2F;files&#x2F;documents&#x2F;cases&#x2F;1910134fbco...</a>), it appears the FTC is not seeking that remedy.It appears VR is still too small of a market for them to care about.

Pretty sure the focus is on Instagram and Whatsapp only, not Oculus.

Ugh, yeah Facebook probably bought Oculus thinking:-What if a lot of people use these in the future-What if they&#x27;re really comfy when they get slim, and people use them all the time, even for essentially web browsing.-Later models can easily have internal and mouth facing cameras so you can smile at people in VR-Let&#x27;s intimately observe the finest twitch of every expression felt by our users, peering deep into their minds, learning more about how to manipulate and destroy humans than anyone ever thought possible.

Oculus doesn&#x27;t present a monopoly concern in advertising, though.

&gt; I know it&#x27;s a pipe dream, but an independent Oculus would make me so happyWhile that would cool for short-term, independent Oculus can stagnate. VR still needs many more billions to be truly usable, and I don&#x27;t think independent company will be able to fund it.

considering some of the things that facebook has been used for it should be very careful about what it does with VR&#x2F;AR and the potential for use as a HUD facilitating an attacker and providing them with a support team

Splitting those two properties off would be fantastic.I know it&#x27;s a pipe dream, but an independent Oculus would make me so happy. I suspect this is impossible due to the early nature of the VR market. Maybe just an FTC requirement _not_ to require a FB login?

From a privacy point of view it doesn&#x27;t matter who collects it so long as the FBI and US military can retrieve it on-demand without a warrant or probable cause under FAA 702.

It should be forbidden after IPO to acquire other companies because of this kills competition before it has the chance to compete.

&gt; From an entrepreneurial point of view I wonder how it will affect the future of big tech players acquiring other companies.It won&#x27;t.The full power of the United States does not reverse all those shares you sold to a big tech company, or sold as a big shareholder of a big tech company.If the market tolerates a price, based on their own exuberance and view of future revenues, that is fine here, and the incentives will continue to promote near term profits with a who-gives-a-shit slim possibility of cleanup by the regulators.Corporations are just a conduit for money, and the regulators only enforce actions on the conduit, and thats a maybe.

From a privacy point of view I agree that it sounds like a good thing and I hope it happens.From an entrepreneurial point of view I wonder how it will affect the future of big tech players acquiring other companies.

Even if they were three separate companies wouldn&#x27;t Mark still have voting control of all three companies?

Huge. I&#x27;m glad Zuckerberg is probably panicking.

Will splitting off Instagram make a meaningful difference given how little protections there are around selling advertising data?I agree we would’ve been better off if they had never been allowed to buy Instagram AND we had meaningful laws in place, but I don’t see how this fundamentally changes things given where we are now.

The FTC allowed the IG merger because* No ads (lol)* Competition from Google even if it did have ads* FB had no competitive photo app

When they originally happened, people thought Zuck was insane.Instagram for $1B? WhatsApp for $17B? Really?FTC definitely isn&#x27;t competent enough to understand how visionary the acquisition was.To be fair, not many was that competent. Otherwise, Google and other cash-loaded companies would have acquired these companies with higher offer.It could have easily been Twitter + Vines + Periscope where the acquired products went nowhere.It&#x27;s unfair to Zuck for being very visionary about this. But antitrust isn&#x27;t about being fair to an individual company...

Thanks Obama.But seriously, by what rationale would you block the purchase in 2012? Instagram only had 25 million users at the time.

If only there were some kind of federal agency, maybe a &quot;trade commission&quot; that could have blocked these mergers when they originally happened ....

Oculus too please!I&#x27;m holding off on merging my Oculus and Facebook accounts as long as possible in hopes that someone tells them to get the hell out of here with that nonsense.

Key line:&gt; The FTC is seeking a permanent injunction in federal court that could, among other things: require divestitures of assets, including Instagram and WhatsApp

FB is on a lot of chopping blocks lately it’s hard to keep track.  I guess this won’t really help with the Diem

Nice! They are also going after API terms of use!This decade is going to be lit.

The long promised and teased suit is finally out in the wild.Interesting that it seems to focus so heavily on acquisitions.

Why would it be a twist I thought Systrom is mad at Mark. I know what whatsapp guys don&#x27;t like mark.

I support this, though have low expectations the divestiture will actually happen.It would be quite the twist though if Kevin Systrom testified for the FTC against FB, though.

They were flat out blocking any links to certain competitors.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;heavy.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;facebook-block-minds-com-unsecure&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;heavy.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;facebook-block-minds-com-unse...</a>

EU at most will just ban FB to allow local competitors to emerge. There&#x27;s no point regulating american companies

Arguable. The antitrust cases against MS had a real and profound effect on the development of the first round of internet companies in the late 90&#x27;s and early 2000&#x27;s, even though it never went to a trial and verdict.

And nothing will come of this except a slap on the wrist. I have more faith in the EU if fines are to be made big enough to make any difference at all.

the code isn&#x27;t the only infrastructure that can intermingle. 
I think whatsapp runs on facebook&#x27;s massive server farms with customized chips - which would hurt whatsapp probably if they need to find a different hosting.I imagine there are probably a lot of other services that are shared or interact in some way - maybe shared email&#x2F;notification services, 2fa services, data analytics&#x2F;BI, monitoring etc...

I don&#x27;t know how much they did with Whatsapp, but I do know they integrated the Facebook ad serving platform into Whatsapp. Breaking up Facebook and Whatsapp would cost Whatsapp that ad serving platform, which is probably nontrivial.

Unless they rewrote Whatsapp from ground up, the two platforms are not mixed. Whatsapp is written in Erlang where Facebook has transitioned from PHP to Hack to the best of my knowledge.

Would be interesting to see a modern day trust busting, wonder how deeply embedded Facebook&#x27;s infrastructure &#x2F; P&amp;Ps is for Whatsapp development.

The way I see it, an important argument is that it won&#x27;t solve the problem: these organizations take advantage of network effects to build monopolies and that mechanism won&#x27;t go away. A good book on this is Who Owns The Future by Jaron Lanier.Of course, forbidding anti-competitive acquisitions would have helped in that maybe then we&#x27;d all be using an independent Instagram under the leadership of its original founders and Facebook would be dying. But that still wouldn&#x27;t change the fact that it would be more than likely to be a quasi monopoly. That&#x27;s just the nature of social networks.

While they crush local competition, they also crush it in other countries. Google and Facebook&#x2F;Whatsapp own a sizeable chunk of Internet interactions in just about every country except China, which in turns means more revenue which can be used to pay these insane Silicon Valley salaries to their workforce.While I don&#x27;t like these monopolistic practices, they have given the US a tremendous amount of power over communications abroad.

Yes.  I would imagine it revolves around demonstrating harm.  Just because something is big doesn&#x27;t necessitate a break up.

Argument for FB not being broken up would be “how does it harm the consumer?”.   Sherman act doesn’t ban monopolies, it’s protects the consumer from being abused by the monopoly.

Yes, the argument is if you split them up their core value proposition is put into question. Apparently a very large group of users are on board with the core value proposition, and you are imposing on that group a ton of assumptions that the regulatory breakup and oversight will end up &quot;working out better for everyone&quot;.These companies are also vulnerable to competition in a fickle market. Tik Tok has gained massive ground and is on a similar trajectory that instagram was on some years ago. For everyone&#x27;s claiming that FB stifles innovation, we have an obvious counterexample happening literally before our eyes.

Lets hope they push through with it and follow up with Google. Its about time - its ridiculous how incredibly powerful these institutions have become.Question: is there an argument not to split up these gigantic corporations?

I could get behind this if the current ones actually followed regulation. FB are so entrenched that they don&#x27;t have to follow the rules as they&#x27;ve demonstrated with Cambridge Analytica among a myriad of other issues with their platform.

what if one of them used privacy as a selling point?

&gt; ... easier to regulate one giant company than a myriad of smaller onesThis sounds... incorrect.Small players are much more vulnerable to fines and other penalties which range from &#x27;cost of doing business&#x27; to &#x27;slap on the wrist&#x27; for the big guys. And small ones don&#x27;t seem to have much in the way of lobbying power or other direct influence over regulators.Maybe more accurate to say that it&#x27;s a bit harder to police lots of small players, but also that it&#x27;s only the small players who produce good behaviour under regulation.

I actually disagree. Regulating a single giant company becomes an exercise in compliance, which American governments are absolutely terrible at. The single giant company has the resources to fight any action that could existentially threaten it. This winds up in its&#x27; own set of abuses.In a robust market of smaller players the regulatory agencies can stick to rulemaking, investigation, and enforcement (civil fines&#x2F;prosecutions), which is what they are great at. Smaller players don&#x27;t have the resources to compete with the government and force them into regulatory trench warfare.This is similar to the situation with the IRS — they spend most of their time auditing EITC cases, and other issues related to poor and middle class people. They don&#x27;t have the resources to collect on the billionaires who have enough power to fight the government to attrition.

&gt; ... Facebook has maintained its monopoly position by buying up companies that present competitive threats and by imposing restrictive policies that unjustifiably hinder actual or potential rivals that Facebook does not or cannot acquireImagine if FB was broken up like old school monopolies. That would definitely open field to a lot of smaller social media startups. I am worried about consumer privacy impacts because it is easier to regulate one giant company than a myriad of smaller ones. Regardless, I say let&#x27;s do it because monopolies and data stewardship are two separate problems and historically monopoly breakdowns did great things for innovation.

Everyone&#x27;s talking about divesting Instagram and WhatsApp, but I would much prefer that the FTC ordered Facebook to acquire and accidentally kill TikTok.

Seems unlikely to me unless you think your children are going to be using computers with flat screens on walls like we do today.

doubt it. oculus alone will fade to obscurity

What is your argument for Facebook being forced to sever Oculus?

Instagram and WhatsApp are old news. The big chip on the board is Oculus. If they can get Facebook to sever Oculus (and Facebook &quot;Reality Labs&quot;, something probably created ahead of this to blur the lines at bit) it would be a huge step forward to mitigate huge harms to come from Facebook.

I&#x27;ve been giving the wrong answer to &quot;Should I buy Bitcoin&quot; since 2011 or so. I was bearish on Amazon when its stock was at 60 because its P&#x2F;E ratio was ridiculous. I&#x27;ve learned to just be comfortable with the fact that I&#x27;m wrong a lot.

On the same note, a relative asked me the same thing when they IPO.I thought if Google could make money selling ads why couldn&#x27;t Facebook. I bought in at IPO price for them. I sold for them about 2 years ago when the price was dropping due to privacy scandals.

I first bought after the clearly emotionally driven price dip at just under $20. It was obvious no one looked at the amount of hard cash they pulled in, and thought using their emotions.

You didn&#x27;t need any traffic snooping to notice millions of Instagram and WhatsApp users. Acquisitions were no brainer for Facebook.

Funnily enough, the co-founder of Onavo (Guy Rosen) is now Facebook&#x27;s &quot;VP of Integrity,&quot; which probably speaks to FB&#x27;s (lack of) commitment to integrity.

Bought all the platforms people were going to jump to.The &quot;Onvao Protect&quot; traffic snooping VPN to identify what up and coming products people were using was one particularly shady part of this strategy.

Given enough time, you can say that about any company.

Wrong?  No, just early.  Yahoo and AOL were really big and growing... until they weren&#x27;t.

&gt; FB buying up the competition probably helped too.Which the FTC could have stopped at any time.

In hindsight, i think a big part is that myspace&#x27;s reach extended mostly to early adopter internet users. Early adopters jump on ships early, but also jump off easily too. Once everyone&#x27;s parents and grandparents jumped on to facebook, that&#x27;s a much better moat.FB buying up the competition probably helped too.

One big difference between FB&#x2F;MySpace is OAuth - you can dump FB the social network, but much harder to dump FB the identity verification service.  OAuth in theory is great, in practice it has been an anti-competitive&#x2F;anti-privacy Trojan Horse.

&gt; Now that Zuck is under so much scrutiny, he won&#x27;t be allowed to acquire the next hot social platform. When instagram isn&#x27;t the &quot;it&quot; platform anymore, Facebook is doomed.Zuck got around that problem copying competitors lock, stock and barrel and using his monopoly to attempt drive out that competition.Instagram was under threat by two &quot;It&quot; networks. Both of them ended up being copied in InstagramFacebook needs to be broken up into three companies to fix it all.

I still think you were correct, you just underestimated how long it would take for this to happen if the company was actually competent (unlike MySpace), and all the money that could be made in the meantime.Facebook The Platform&#x27;s userbase keeps getting older and less engaged, millennials and younger have largely shifted to instagram. Taken by itself, Facebook the platform doesn&#x27;t have great looking prospects.Instagram is the current hot thing, and is keeping Facebook The Company on the growth trajectory, but it too will suffer the same problem eventually.Now that Zuck is under so much scrutiny, he won&#x27;t be allowed to acquire the next hot social platform. When instagram isn&#x27;t the &quot;it&quot; platform anymore, Facebook is doomed.My prediction: if the US government does nothing, Facebook the company will slowly peak and then start shrinking over the next 5-10 years and the problem will start solving itself.Their data moat becomes infinitely less valuable if the graph of users and engagement is a downward slope instead of an upward one.

Craigslist has had it coming for a long time.There are other marketplaces that proved the value of identity and reputation like Mercari and offerup in p2p before fb marketplace launched its own.I do think FB would stomp or buy other marketplaces, but that there is even a smidgen of opportunity in this space in the US is due to the neglect of buckmaster and newmark.They went from benevolent dictators to doggedly avoiding any increase in value to users.This has happened at great detriment to Craigslist users who have been scammed, dealt with well-known but terrible landlords and wasted countless lifetimes due to the shoddy communication features of the site.I am no fan of Facebook, but have only crocodile tears for Craigslist.

Have you ever sold anything on Facebook Marketplace? It&#x27;s shockingly easy. I&#x27;m relatively late to the party. When I used it for the first time earlier this year I felt like it was the wave of the future.

Facebook was smart, it wasn&#x27;t just a social network, it also was an apps and games platform. Remember Farmville? And also many bands ended up putting their merch and tour dates up on FB because it was just so easy.Then recently it grew a marketplace to take on craigslist and ebay, and added videos (making it a mini youtube or tiktok).And let&#x27;s not forget that FB groups are the go-to place for many hobbies. Into old cars? Or old sewing machines? You won&#x27;t find an active forum for those things, or if you do, they&#x27;re 1000x more hostile and trollish than FB&#x27;s groups.So my question is, where do you draw the line? Was FB marketplace anticompetitive because it pushed out craigslist?I guess this whole thing is a fishing expedition to see if the justice department can find a smoking gun email where someone says, like, &quot;Let&#x27;s be anticompetitive with snapchat&quot; or something...

The lesson is never to answer the question with yes&#x2F;no. Get them to come up with their own opinion, do their own research, and decide how much to invest in Facebook, if anything at all (it&#x27;s not really a YES&#x2F;NO but how much, and for how long...). If they don&#x27;t want to do all this work... recommend SPY.

The fact that there are a great number of people not on Facebook whose online identity is just fine is ample refutation of this absurd claim.And Facebook login being &quot;necessary&quot;?... Never used it. Never will.

The way facebook is different is that it isn&#x27;t just a social network, it IS your online identity. The fact that they make you use your real name rather than just some username is what made it work. And what continues to make it a more permanent part of who you are digitally. Facebook login makes it even more intertwined and hard to remove.

My mom asked me the same thing back in 2014 and I essentially felt the same way as you so I said the same thing. She bought some anyway though, and later sold when it hit $200. Glad she didn&#x27;t listen to me.

When Facebook first went public, an older relative asked me if he should invest in Facebook. My only insight was being an internet user at the time and I said no, there was no reason that Facebook wouldn’t be another MySpace. Facebook&#x27;s only value was their users and users were historically very finicky and moved around platforms at will. I argued that Facebook would make no money and wouldn’t be around in a couple of years. This obviously turned out wildly wrong but I always thought the user moat was always an issue and Facebook’s downfall would be related to it. I guess what this lawsuit says is that they essentially just bought their way out of people platform jumping.

The revenue generating customers of Facebook are not the social network&#x27;s users.

From the FTC.gov[1]:&quot;The antitrust laws prohibit conduct by a single firm that unreasonably restrains competition by creating or maintaining monopoly power. Most Section 2 claims involve the conduct of a firm with a leading market position, although Section 2 of the Sherman Act also bans attempts to monopolize and conspiracies to monopolize. As a first step, courts ask if the firm has &quot;monopoly power&quot; in any market. This requires in-depth study of the products sold by the leading firm, and any alternative products consumers may turn to if the firm attempted to raise prices. Then courts ask if that leading position was gained or maintained through improper conduct—that is, something other than merely having a better product, superior management or historic accident. Here courts evaluate the anticompetitive effects of the conduct and its procompetitive justifications.&quot;Does FB unreasonably restrain competition? (My answer is no)Does FB have an alternative? (Mewe&#x2F;Parler&#x2F;Gab etc. - Mewe being the most direct alternative)Then courts ask if that leading position was gained or maintained through improper conduct—that is, something other than merely having a better product, superior management or historic accident. - I&#x27;d say no.I don&#x27;t see anything this lawsuit stands on.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;tips-advice&#x2F;competition-guidance&#x2F;guide-antitrust-laws&#x2F;single-firm-conduct&#x2F;monopolization-defined" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;tips-advice&#x2F;competition-guidance&#x2F;guide-a...</a>

This is anecdotal but I started using TikTok during the pandemic and it has greatly reduced my use of Facebook. Mindlessly scrolling the TikTok ForYouPage is noticably superior to scrolling the Facebook feed

Could the average Facebook user readily replace their use of Facebook with LinkedIn or TikTok? I am not a big user of any of those products, but I have the distinct impression that the answer is no.

Likely just posturing and games. Looking at the share price, the market is not concerned. This is not at all like the DOJ suing MSFT in 1998. Likely FB will settle or it will be forgotten or overturned by incoming Biden admiration.

Having a Facebook account is a symbolic&#x2F;emotional injury to a tech contrarian, but I don’t see the courts particularly caring about that. It’s not like you have to actually spend any time or money on it.

I&#x27;ll give an easy example: Requiring users to have a Facebook account to use their Oculus device.

No, they do compete with WhatsApp, on the basis of those points of differentiation.

Yet they can do so very easily at the flip of a button, so to speak. The capability exists, and simply because potential competitors choose to not compete in the same space is what makes WhatsApp a monopoly?See Skype, for example - the largest market penetration for a period of time and practically no one uses them any more. They were video-centric, yet the user base is already there for an extension into a primarily text medium. Not tied to an employer, doesn&#x27;t require an invitation, subscription, friend network, setup to use, etc...

Line, Viber, Telegram, Signal, Matrix etc etc.....there is so much competition in the messaging space.

&gt; iMessage, Slack, TeamsThese don’t really compete with WhatsApp, which is cross platform, not tied to an employer, doesn’t require an invitation, subscription, friend network, setup to use, among other things.

This case seems like a really stupid way to try to do some consumer protection versus writing laws that do it directly.I’m still confused as to which “market” is harmed: advertisers? Facebook users? other social networks?If the market is Facebook users, what’s the precedent in asserting this level of harm to a market that consists substantially of non-paying users of an inessential service?

How is it possible to abuse a market position when there are thousands of active competitors threatening to eat Facebook&#x27;s lunch in each of the areas it leads in? The app stores and web are still full of social media upstarts

If only the same entity that is now suing them for antitrust didn&#x27;t approve these acquisitions, and fairly recently as well.

I think we need to both break up and regulate them.We had a few decades of true antitrust, but the efforts to undermine it were successful. Check out Goliath by Matt Stoller for a decent history.

The term &#x27;monopoly&#x27; is confusing because the pedantic definition is that there&#x27;s only one player but this isn&#x27;t the legal definition.It&#x27;s not actually illegal to be a monopoly but to illegally abuse your market position leading to anti-competitive behavior.Unfortunately, it&#x27;s never enforce properly as the FTC doesn&#x27;t have any teeth.I think the only way we&#x27;re going to solve this is to actually TAX these companies appropriately. This is one of the major reasons they metastasize.

This is a constant misconception in these discussions but antitrust litigation and penalties don&#x27;t require there to be a monopoly.The allegation here is anti-competitive behavior. There are plenty of things you an do that are anti-competitive and illegal without actually achieving a monopoly. The classic example is price fixing but there are many others.Unsurprisingly, the actual linked article in this thread spells out these allegations of anti-competitive actions on Facebook&#x27;s part.

A monopoly over your personal relationships, I suppose.Twitter, TikTok, and HN all thrive on strangers communicating with each other.

By this definition it seems like every social media app, by virtue of it being different, is a monopoly of its own? Eg: Twitter is “Twitter” that is the problem.

You might read up on the Trusts era that brought about the Sherman Act[1]. Trains? Horse carriages and wagons were still available, not to mention boats. However, these are not equal modes of travel, though they are &quot;similar&quot; in that they are transportation, and so it&#x27;s not about internet-based communities per se.It&#x27;s the fact that Facebook is &quot;Facebook&quot; that is the problem. That you can&#x27;t imagine Facebook&#x27;s equal being viable in any way, other than to mention the wagons and horses of the internet. This is not to comment on a level of sophistication, but features. What can you sell on TikTok through TikTok? It&#x27;s a category error to equate them with FB. Facebook has cultivated this state of affairs, and they have gone out of their way to interfere with the success of companies it views as competition.[2]This is even before we get to the use of Facebook to create negative externalities, for which it provides powerful tools. On purpose.1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sherman_Antitrust_Act_of_1890#Background" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Sherman_Antitrust_Act_of_1890#...</a>2. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;07&#x2F;29&#x2F;in-antitrust-hearing-zuckerberg-admits-facebook-has-copied-its-competition&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;techcrunch.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;07&#x2F;29&#x2F;in-antitrust-hearing-zucke...</a>

Maybe it&#x27;s to do with social network advertising? (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;marketingland.com&#x2F;almost-70-of-digital-ad-spending-going-to-google-facebook-amazon-says-analyst-firm-262565" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;marketingland.com&#x2F;almost-70-of-digital-ad-spending-g...</a>)I have no knowledge in this area, so just throwing it out there for more informed minds to fill in the blanks.

From the article, the claim is:&gt; illegally maintaining its personal social networking monopoly&quot;Monopoly&quot; is a term that&#x27;s fairly overloaded&#x2F;misunderstood; while in economics refers specifically to a situation where there is a single supplier for a good&#x2F;service (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Monopoly#Market_structures" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Monopoly#Market_structures</a>), in the legal definition &quot;monopoly power&quot; is defined much more loosely, as &quot;the power to control prices or exclude competition&quot; in the US (e.g. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justice.gov&#x2F;atr&#x2F;competition-and-monopoly-single-firm-conduct-under-section-2-sherman-act-chapter-2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justice.gov&#x2F;atr&#x2F;competition-and-monopoly-single-...</a>), and there are complex tests for monopoly power in the EU including &gt;50% market share which I&#x27;m less familiar with.I think common discourse tends to interpret monopoly in the economics sense, which leads to confusion when we look at antitrust enforcement like this. Not to mention that under antitrust laws you don&#x27;t even need to have (loosely defined) &quot;monopoly power&quot; to be engaging in illegal anticompetitive behaviors.Specifically analyzing those competitors:LinkedIn is a business social network, not a personal social network as they define it. Forums are not &quot;social networks&quot; as commonly defined (graph of relationships).Twitter is a competitor, but they have far less market share, e.g. see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.t4.ai&#x2F;industry&#x2F;social-media-market-share#:~:text=The%20leading%20platform%20in%20the,with%202%25%20social%20media%20market" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.t4.ai&#x2F;industry&#x2F;social-media-market-share#:~:text...</a> which puts Facebook at 69% of social media users, (a monopoly in most definitions), while twitter is at ~8%. Somewhat confounding because users can be on both, but the magnitudes are what&#x27;s important.TikTok is a valid competitor too, but again they don&#x27;t have nearly as dominant a position as Facebook &lt;25% of FB&#x27;s MAU according to <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;datareportal.com&#x2F;social-media-users?rq=tiktok" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;datareportal.com&#x2F;social-media-users?rq=tiktok</a>.I think Ben Thompson has the best analysis of antitrust as it pertains to Facebook, as he deeply understands the market dynamics that give Facebook and other large tech companies their market power, e.g. see <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stratechery.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;manifestos-and-monopolies&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;stratechery.com&#x2F;2017&#x2F;manifestos-and-monopolies&#x2F;</a>.

&gt; Monopoly of what?&quot;Social advertising&quot;.<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;CaseyNewton&#x2F;status&#x2F;1336762362821443585" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;CaseyNewton&#x2F;status&#x2F;1336762362821443585</a>

WhatsApp is a social network because it has stories.

Monopoly of what? Some other social networks I use every day or so: Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok and various forums and communities like this one, which in my mind are pretty similar to a social network.And since WhatsApp is a chat app, how about all the other chat apps I am using? iMessage, Slack, Teams.Does this action has any merit or is it just the usual political posturing and games?

My guess is that this will end up the same was as the Microsoft case. Building network effects is not anti-competitive behavior. FB will argue that they are in fierce competition with Google in the market where they make their revenue, advertising. Not really relevant what the relative market concentration is in other non-revenue generating markets (social networking &#x2F; search), which are only used to generate attention for the ads they sell in a market where FB&#x27;s relative market power is &lt; 50%.

Because the people in charge were happy with them at the time

IG was tiny at the time, not the behemoth it is today. They hadn&#x27;t even released on Android yet.

So if the acquisition of IG and Whats App were wrong, why did they get regulatory approval at the time?

I&#x27;d agree with you in theory, but in practice, those API endpoints end up being exploit vectors for data leakage in various ways - either through actual security vulns or through the security vulnerability that exists between the monitor and the chair.

They tried this and had to stop after “I trust Cambridge Analytica, so please send my data there”...

&gt; On one hand, forcing Facebook to open up its social graph would have serious privacy implications.There shouldn&#x27;t be much additional privacy concern with a Facebook user saying &quot;I trust user Alice and service example.com, so please send all my posts to alice@example.com using ActivityPub.&quot;Similarly, Alice should be able to tell example.com that she trusts the Facebook user Bob with ID 123456789, so that example.com sends her posts to Facebook addressed to Bob (perhaps authenticated with a pre-shared key that Bob emailed her).Once users are free to move between providers, those providers can compete based on their level of privacy and security, which right now Facebook has little incentive to improve.

Opening up the social graph seems almost exclusively a privacy concern. The examples you bring up between Instagram &#x2F; Twitter are primarily about marketing and onboarding new users to competing services. This isn&#x27;t actually going to lead to much user conversion unless the competing service is actually meaningfully more interesting. If it is meaningfully more interesting, then users will share it on their own (see Tik Tok), rather demonstrating that regulating the social graph is completely pointless.

&gt; The complaint also alleges that Facebook, over many years, has imposed anticompetitive conditions on third-party software developers’ access to valuable interconnections to its platform, such as the application programming interfaces (“APIs”) that allow the developers’ apps to interface with Facebook. In particular, Facebook allegedly has made key APIs available to third-party applications only on the condition that they refrain from developing competing functionalities, and from connecting with or promoting other social networking services.On one hand, forcing Facebook to open up its social graph would have serious privacy implications.On the other, it would provide an incredible boost to any new social network, which could quickly bootstrap off your existing friends. That&#x27;s what Instagram did with Twitter and what Vine did with Facebook.The most important feature of a social network has always been whether your friends&#x2F;family use it. If any new social network can take advantage of Facebook&#x27;s social graph via API, that neutralizes this advantage. Now Facebook is forced to compete by being a better social network, not just a bigger one.

Good. Facebook owns so much of the ad market now, and their support is non-existent. They have run ads that I didn&#x27;t want running at all, haven&#x27;t let me pause them, and haven&#x27;t responded to support requests through their platform or through social media. I am really worried about what happens if they keep growing.

Hilarious that FB is being targeted for Instagram and Whatsapp when there&#x27;s plenty of competition in the market. And somehow Google get&#x27;s a free pass and so does Amazon.

&gt; What would be the precedent if regulatory approvals could be challenged with a change in administration?That&#x27;s like someone is approved for a license to own a gun, then that person uses the gun to commit a crime, and then their license is revoked. Then someone points the finger at whoever it was that approved that person for a gun license.What would be the precedent if a merger approval gave you a free pass to be anti-competitive?

The FTC is an executive agency with the enforcement equivalent of prosecutorial discretion. It&#x27;s not a court.

This is the thing I have a hard time understanding, as far as I&#x27;m aware the FTC approved all this, these were not forceful takeovers.What would be the precedent if regulatory approvals could be challenged with a change in administration?

&gt; However, having existing companies be forced to be spun out in their entirely... I have a hard time imagining that being the outcome, given the chilling effect it could have on the rest of the industry.What&#x27;s hilarious is that breakups and divestiture were considered a completely commonplace occurrence up until a generation ago. It was just a matter of course for the FTC and DOJ to deal with companies that had gotten too big or were engaging in questionable behavior and forcing them to break up into pieces.This, of course, was generally a good thing. Then we just sort of stopped. Now we&#x27;re at a point where your point of view, which is that this is &quot;hard to imagine&quot; is a completely reasonable one.It shouldn&#x27;t be though. The current situation of consolidation at the top of our economy is wildly unstable and harmful to workers, consumers, and fledgeling entrepreneurs alike, and we should never have let it get this out of control.

I&#x27;m also not a lawyer, but this sounds unconstitutional. This lawsuit sounds even more extreme than ex post facto laws, since antitrust laws haven&#x27;t changed.My pet theory is that the legislature is so divided and incompetent that laws are horribly outdated. The other two branches of government need to compensate. Google v. Oracle is another example of this.

Not a lawyer, but I&#x27;m really curious to see how this plays out. This case has a lot of confounding factors:* other companies&#x2F;entities that can be considered &quot;competitors&quot; (Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, etc)* the acquisitions in question (Instagram and WhatsApp) being approved by the suing entity (namely, the FTC) themselves back in the dayI wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if an outcome of this were to be say, limits against cross-linking acquisitions together or the like in the future. However, having existing companies be forced to be spun out in their entirely... I have a hard time imagining that being the outcome, given the chilling effect it could have on the rest of the industry.

I&#x27;m not trying to troll but the reaction to &quot;It&#x27;s my f*cking data!&quot; should be to seriously look into projects like Urbit. Where you do in fact own and control your own data.

This is so misdirected...We need transparency, not this.How is there not some sort of regulation to allow me to opt-out or configure these algorithms that target me for ads of curated content?It&#x27;s my f*cking data!

Facebook.com. has such a shitty user experience, I&#x27;m I the only one surprised it still has so many MAUs?(This comment has nothing to do with Whatsapp and Instagram, just Facebook web)

The biggest challenge would be the advertising. Moving photos is far easier.Replicating and building out an ad platform like FBs from zero would be very very hard. None of the other social platforms ad networks are even close in quality but especially interface&#x2F;targeting&#x2F;features. Snap &#x2F; TW I would say are at maybe 5% if I had to pick a number...Especially especially taking into account integration with FB pixel.

Photo hosting might have been the biggest immediate change back in 2012, but since then there have been a lot of features added to IG that share a lot with FB. You&#x27;ve probably seen things like recommendations of people to follow in IG based on FB Pages that you&#x27;ve liked, etc. And video streaming infrastructure is shared, and that&#x27;s much more complicated than photos.

As far as I know the biggest change was hosting the pictures on Facebook server infrastructure. So it requires copying the pictures to another infrastructure and replacing the URLs ? Of course it will be a huge task but I don&#x27;t think that FB and IG are sharing a lot of code.

The thing is, technically it&#x27;s actually far more difficult to integrate than it is to separate.Facebook has been trying to make it appear that integration will make separation impossible.But the reality is, you simply duplicate the databases and whatever shared services they depend on, and create a &quot;stub&quot; FB backend for IG, and a &quot;stub&quot; IG backend for FB for the shared services to work... and they go on their merry independent ways, while engineers remove things that depend on the stubs at their leisure.Obviously it&#x27;s not trivial (and involves the inherent complexities of any datacenter migration), and doing it without downtime is a whole separate beast, but it&#x27;s not impossible or so wildly difficult it can&#x27;t be carried out. In other words, there&#x27;s zero reason it should be a factor in the legal outcome.At most, there would be an IP issue -- e.g. would the spun-out IG be permitted to have a stubbed FB backend, and vice-versa -- but that&#x27;s easily solved by providing those permissions as part of the separation agreement, with a timeline to remove them (e.g. 2 years).

How would splitting Instagram work from a technical perspective? Engineers have spent 8 years building shared code and data centers for FB and IG. I&#x27;d expect it would take hundreds of people and multiple years to untangle them.

&gt; Even Bill Gates has cleaned up his reputationIt&#x27;s amazing what a few billion dollars of charitable donations can buy you. This is called &quot;fumigating your fortune&quot;.

For better or worse, I really doubt this matters.Even Bill Gates has cleaned up his reputation, let alone engineers who worked at MS in monopoly days. I don&#x27;t think anyone that was there at the time is worried about how it reflects on them personally.

A lack of conscience can be a very marketable trait ;)

Sticking by Facebook now might be seen as a desirable trait in the eyes of some future employers. I&#x27;m looking at you Oracle.

&gt; Future employers
&gt; damaging to the global social fabricI&#x27;m skeptical there&#x27;d be any hard feelings from other global corporations, arguably doing the same thing

Maybe if you&#x27;re in the c-suite or work in a CSR role.  Nobody does this when they hire software developers.

I know people who have worked on drone targeting software that has killed civilians. No one cares.

If you work at Facebook it&#x27;s time to seriously consider leaving to avoid damage to your own brand. Future employers are going to be scrutinizing your record and will ask you difficult questions about why you stuck by Facebook despite an overwhelming consensus that they are damaging to the global social fabric.

This to me is the only compelling argument and I personally hope the government makes this successfully. Trying to look at IG&#x2F;WhatsApp acquisitions is dumb imho.But FB has consistently introduced open APIs and features, let them gain traction, then shut them down and replicated the most popular features.I have been burned multiple times. Most recently new restrictions on Messaging.If FB was mandated to restore some APIs possible make new ones for interoperability (while keeping the privacy changes over the years) that would be super super valuable to help other companies make value without trying some fruitless and probably not sound breakup.

Most of there APIs are for preferred partners only, see for example their ecommerce, whatsapp or events apis, almost nothing can be accessed by a programmer working on his own.

The most interesting part to developers: they may require facebook to offer certain APIs?&gt; The complaint also alleges that Facebook, over many years, has imposed anticompetitive conditions on third-party software developers’ access to valuable interconnections to its platform, such as the application programming interfaces (“APIs”) that allow the developers’ apps to interface with Facebook. In particular, Facebook allegedly has made key APIs available to third-party applications only on the condition that they refrain from developing competing functionalities, and from connecting with or promoting other social networking services.&gt; The complaint alleges that Facebook has enforced these policies by cutting off API access to blunt perceived competitive threats from rival personal social networking services, mobile messaging apps, and other apps with social functionalities. For example, in 2013, Twitter launched the app Vine, which allowed users to shoot and share short video segments. In response, according to the complaint, Facebook shut down the API that would have allowed Vine to access friends via Facebook.Making API&#x27;s available &quot;only on the condition that [developers] refrain from developing competing functionalities&quot; is one thing; and I can see how that seems anticompetitive, I dont&#x27; know enough about the law to say when anticompetitive is illegal.But that second one is more interesting. &quot;shut down the API that would have allowed Vine to access friends via Facebook&quot; -- they didn&#x27;t just not have Vine have access to it, they removed it, and that is being complained about. The implication to me seems to be that facebook must provide certain API&#x27;s to avoid anticompetitive behavior?The API I personally most miss and am interested in is Events. My interest is definitely in reducing facebook&#x27;s lock on users. A lot of people I know find missing out on events the hardest reason to leave facebook, and if an API was available show Facebook events on other platforms, it would definitely aid people in leaving Facebook, which is I presume exactly why Facebook got rid of the API, which sounds pretty similar to the Vine complaint, although I don&#x27;t know whether there was a specific facebook competitor threatening them with events integration. I would be thrilled if the FTC made Facebook restore an Events API, hopefully in a way that was sufficiently full-featured for the kinds of integrations that would help people get off facebook. (&quot;Help people get off&quot;, it sounds like an addiction, yup).

That same perspective shows that the industry has evolved since then. If FTC can&#x27;t be held accountable for not predicting the future neither can Facebook. Of course, I don&#x27;t believe this at all since anyone in the industry knew exactly why Facebook would buy Instagram, especially the FTC.

For perspective, the acquisition was before IG had ads and before Facebook was publicly traded. How was the FTC supposed to magically see the future anti-competitive actions (like blocking vine)?

&gt; It isn&#x27;t Zuck&#x27;s fault nobody else is as competitive as Facebook isFTC seems to be arguing that at least part of the reason why that is the case was the employment of illegal tactics by Facebook.

IANAL, but my understanding is legally, they can decide not to sue&#x2F;block it. This is not the same thing as affirmatively approving it.

I thought new evidence came to light that FB used illegally obtained metrics about IG and Whatsapp that allowed them inside information about the accusations.Something about the FB mobile app siphoning off mobile data about other app usage

&quot;It isn&#x27;t Zuck&#x27;s fault nobody else is as competitive as Facebook is.... I look at you MySpace and Twitter.&quot;Social Networks have natural Monopolies.Not that I believe FB is necessarily a monopoly in the economic sense, but it&#x27;s not quite right to talk about &#x27;competition&#x27; in systems that are designed to have one winner.If there were 5 Twitters for example, one of them would eventually dominate, one way or another.

This doesn&#x27;t make sense who authorized Instagram and Whatsapp acquisitions at the first place? FTC [1]It isn&#x27;t Zuck&#x27;s fault nobody else is as competitive as Facebook is.... I look at you MySpace and Twitter.[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;news-events&#x2F;press-releases&#x2F;2012&#x2F;08&#x2F;ftc-closes-its-investigation-facebooks-proposed-acquisition" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ftc.gov&#x2F;news-events&#x2F;press-releases&#x2F;2012&#x2F;08&#x2F;ftc-c...</a>&quot;The Federal Trade Commission has closed its nonpublic investigation of Facebook&#x27;s proposed acquisition of Instagram, Inc., without taking any action. Accordingly, the deal may now proceed as proposed.&quot;&quot;The Commission vote to close the investigation was 5-0.&quot;

&gt; The FTC is seeking a permanent injunction in federal court that could, among other things: require divestitures of assets, including Instagram and WhatsApp; prohibit Facebook from imposing anticompetitive conditions on software developers; and require Facebook to seek prior notice and approval for future mergers and acquisitions.If the FTC has their way, Facebook will need to seek prior notice and approval for future mergers and acquisitions.

I think the key is not whether they&#x27;ll have to divest current platforms, but if they can acquire whatever will be the next popular platform. If Zuckerberg sells Instagram, but can still buy the next platform, he&#x27;ll always maintain his monopoly.

Wow, this is huge. I just wonder how would it even work if Instagram was forced to separate?So this means Facebook and Google were hit with lawsuits, when is Apple and Amazon next?I can even understand the Google lawsuit, but can someone explain to me how is Facebook a monopoly? I find a bigger problem Apple than Facebook. It is Google and Apple that have a death grip on the mobile market...

WhatsApp can just be considered as worldwide communications infrastructure. More important than text&#x2F;calls. No way should all of that be in the control of one single (also cretinous) company.Good luck on this one America. I have low expectations but high hopes.

Note that the states filed a separate suit that is slightly broader in scope: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ag.ny.gov&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;facebook_complaint_12.9.2020.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ag.ny.gov&#x2F;sites&#x2F;default&#x2F;files&#x2F;facebook_complaint_12....</a>

This is the most boneheaded move from the US government ever. This will hurt the US position on the Internet. It will also cause Silicon Valley salaries to go lower. Developers are getting paid high salaries because of Google and Facebook; any moves to split these companies into smaller companies will cause the salaries to drop, as smaller companies will not be able to pay the salaries Google and Facebook pay to its employees.This will hurt the Valley.

I fully support breaking up big tech, but there are geopolitical dimensions I&#x27;m surprised many pushing breaking up big tech don&#x27;t seem to consider. It&#x27;s much easier for non-US entities to selectively block and pressure smaller services.

Facebook feels like a punching bag to me but not the company I am most concerned about from an anti-trust perspective. I am more concerned about the amount of market influence and power wrapped up in Google (Search and Ads), Microsoft (able to freely steal ideas like Slack and turn it into Teams by leveraging O365), Amazon (amassed capital letting them compete in any segment), Apple (acquiring companies and then over-verticalizing) etc. We need a revision of anti-trust law for the modern era, to encourage competition against these giant conglomerates.I think there will be a lot of ancillary benefits from breaking up these organizations that should be welcome to all parts of the political spectrum. Distribution of market power means distribution of financial outcomes as well. It lowers barriers for others to challenge incumbents. It allows companies to decentralize from a few overly-powerful city-states. And so on.

They’d a lot of glue, but not much is inseparable. Messenger tying to Instagram, for example, was entirely tactical. A dozen people might miss that feature.

same business case as Internet Explorer being inseparable part of Windows 95 Kernel thus they HAD to be bundled together...I&#x27;m sure stuff like these sounded fine in decision maker heads...

Facebook has been preparing for this for years:- cross-app communication between Messenger and Instagram- Messenger API enabling business communication on Instagram- ad management for Instagram and Facebook through a centralized platform- WhatsApp business accounts linking to Facebook accounts- Facebook shopping in-app in WhatsAppThese are all small and there are many more examples, but an overarching theme is to integrate FB&#x27;s products as much as possible. It&#x27;s not only to increase adoption and revenue, but also to make them appear inseparable.

No thanks, I don’t want to spend all day receiving spam via WhatsApp like in the days of irc.

&gt; Laying out laws and regulations so the market works as intended (no doubt with adjustments on the way) seems like the far preferable way to ensure healthy competition...That&#x27;s what antitrust&#x2F;monopoly laws do.

&gt; This is an action that could have profoundly disruptive effectIf FB is doing anti-competitive things than disruption is needed. It&#x27;s not meant to be comfortable.Companies are really good at learning the playing field and then gaming it for their benefits. Tweaks to laws are often easy to work around. Disruption that stops an illegal monopoly is going to be uncomfortable. Especially at first.But, it opens the door for the future in ways that aren&#x27;t options today.

Your answer sidesteps regulatory capture. These big companies wield massive power in Washington, don&#x27;t you think any regulation and law that&#x27;s actually passed will benefit them and prevent competition?

In some sense this lawsuit is saying that the regulatory approvals of the Instagram and Whatsapp acquisitions were errors.How is the market going to fix that?

&gt; it&#x27;s not really clear what the positives or negatives would beIsn&#x27;t this also true for Facebook itself as related to how dependent they are on revenue and at what cost that comes to the users who help generate it (by being presented as &quot;eyeballs&quot; to the advertisers)?We used to let kids play with dry cleaning bags, until we discovered they were idiots and can suffocate on them.The realization today is that parents were the actual idiots, not the kids.

&gt;I agree and find the attempt at a breakup a bit frustrating. This is an action that could have profoundly disruptive effect and it&#x27;s not really clear what the positives or negatives would be.This organization itself is disruptive. As interesting as it is to discuss the potential costs and benefits, there&#x27;s been a very real cost to society for these issues. It makes no sense to wait for further damage reports if that&#x27;s at the cost of further damage. It&#x27;s simple cost vs benefits really. Also I thought disruption was a good thing..?Downvoted so I&#x27;ll just add one more thing; this isn&#x27;t a conversation that is new. I&#x27;m coming to this with that context. Do I want them to fail? No. The desired outcome is that they will self regulate. But if not, there should be competition. Monopolies naturally have negative side effects, that&#x27;s why we try to avoid them.

&gt;For instance, FB has invested massively in trust and safety people operations and AI. What happens to that investment when IG is spun off?If what&#x27;s being said is that those investments are important and necessary, then we should be looking for reasons to sustain them that aren&#x27;t just about validating the continued existence of a monopoly.

And yet, Facebook is untrustworthy, unsafe, and had developed AI that amplifies controversy...The Facebook purchases of WhatsApp and Instagram were not innovative and should have triggered antitrust at the time. There is no healthy competition when you buy Any worthy competitors.

Tough. There is more at stake than FB recovering its investment into IG.Besides... they will get to sell it, probably at a profit. They got to own it for 8 years, enjoyed the benefits of lowered competition. They will be fine. I agree that this should have been prevented in the first place, but we are where we are.Controversially, I don&#x27;t think ordinary rule of law can apply to FAANG-scale monopolies. There&#x27;s no way to generalize rules, laws or industrial policies when the industry is &quot;social media.&quot; Social media is (economically) mostly FB. Any rule, law or policy is basically regulating FB specifically.Anyway, the danger of a hammer coming out is low. Even if prosecutors succeed, a cost-of-business fine is the most likely result. Even if they do spin out whatsapp &amp; IG... that leaves facebook mostly intact.I&#x27;d also note that the worst case scenario for overzealous trustbusting is basically nothing. At worst you kill FB. This isn&#x27;t steel production or auto manufacturing. FB could be swallowed by a demon tomorrow and by next thursday any shortage in social media will be filled. We&#x27;re not exactly short on the stuff.FB bring in $80bn pa, but that&#x27;s totally arbitrary to the cost of doing social networking. It could be done for $40bn or $8bn and I doubt the consumer would notice a difference. Again, this isn&#x27;t auto manufacturing. A car company can&#x27;t make as many cars with half the revenue. If one dies, we actually have less manufacturing capacity and we&#x27;ll make fewer cars for a while. None of this applies to social media.

I agree and find the attempt at a breakup a bit frustrating. This is an action that could have profoundly disruptive effect and it&#x27;s not really clear what the positives or negatives would be. For instance, FB has invested massively in trust and safety people operations and AI. What happens to that investment when IG is spun off?Laying out laws and regulations so the market works as intended (no doubt with adjustments on the way) seems like the far preferable way to ensure healthy competition than taking a hammer to the job site and hoping for the best.

Why? WhatsApp today is a great messaging app platform with end-to-end encryption.

Agreed. Federated service or not, no corporation should have that much power.

In an ideal world, I&#x27;d like both. Mandated interoperability would help a great deal—but I also don&#x27;t believe Facebook should ever have been allowed to buy Whatsapp, and it&#x27;s worth undoing that.

That&#x27;s why we have antitrust laws--and why, on unfortunately rare occasions, we enforce them.

With both Google and Facebook, mandatory licensing of their advertising inventory (within reason) would help competitors grow.  Advertisers want to buy on Facebook&#x2F;Google because they are the only two ad platforms with quality and scale.  Companies like Pinterest&#x2F;Twitter&#x2F;Snapchat don&#x27;t have the enough scale to be interesting to most advertisers.  Programatic marketplaces (Adwords, etc.) have the scale, but not the quality (too many spammy publishers and lack of identity resolution across the marketplace).  If the big two digital ad platforms were required to license their premium inventory, other companies could invest in their products and gain substantial incremental revenues as consumers started using them.  With current business practice, you need to reach massive scale before you can even think about monetizing at reasonable rate ($30+ CPM).

Let&#x27;s wait a few years. Bloat will kill these companies. It&#x27;s inevitable.

You can&#x27;t really compete with FAANG. They are too big. They just destroy or buy all competitors. Especially Facebook.

Stop using their free service and block their Javascript. Don&#x27;t use apps built with their login framework.

I want Facebook to stop tracking me, not enable more of it. Which does this enable?

But you could get your own data and the list of people authorized to see it, and pass that to a third party. If you and one of your friends both move to another network, you get to see each other&#x27;s data. Any problem with this?

It&#x27;s kind of amazing how most even tech people don&#x27;t seem to understand this.

You encrypt user data and provide decryption keys to the service once a user actually signs up.

&gt; There&#x27;s no way to provide access to the social graph in a privacy preserving way.Multiparty secure computation is one possible way. There are a few, emerging implementations.

&gt; There&#x27;s no way to provide access to the social graph in a privacy preserving way.If we&#x27;re not okay with other companies having access then why is it okay for a single company to have that access? Do you know and trust every facebook employee including those that don&#x27;t work there yet with your data? Do you trust that that data will be securely handled when the company is sold after declaring bankruptcy?I think your objection is an accidental straw-man. I don&#x27;t think it was intentionally made, it is a valid thought to ponder but it should exist independent of the question of sharing data.

I think there is a lack of imagination here.Perhaps a &quot;social graph&quot; shouldn&#x27;t belong to any company. The concept itself might be anti-privacy.Perhaps it&#x27;s time to move back to simpler things like OPML. (Which people seem more comfortable sharing freely - not sure if that&#x27;s still a &quot;social graph&quot; tho.)Perhaps specific relationship details shouldn&#x27;t be housed in the social network - just the permission to follow.Perhaps companies who house a &quot;social graph&quot; should be regulated - similar to what is done with medical data. It should be a toxic substance.I just think we&#x27;re a long way from doing this right and there are a lot of untried options - and I lack imagination as well.

Meanwhile in the parallel universe, in Russia, VKontakte provides full API access to anyone who clicks the button to create an API app. You only need manual review if you want access to messaging from user tokens, and that&#x27;s a relatively recent change. Somehow, this hasn&#x27;t turned into a privacy nightmare in more than 10 years the API was available.I&#x27;m not defending VK — it does some increasingly user-hostile stuff too after having been acquired by Mail.Ru Group — but you can still integrate it into whatever the hell you want with ease.

If you can see the data, you can share the data. Preventing sharing is exactly as possible as DRM, i.e. only doable by outlawing general-purpose computing.So while I value privacy, I&#x27;m not sympathetic to using privacy as an argument to restrict your own access to your Facebook data, for you to decide yourself on how that&#x27;s shared. If you misuse your view of your friends&#x27; data, that&#x27;s on you and up to your friends to punish&#x2F;discourage you for.

Multisig encryption? Revoke key access to anyone you don&#x27;t want to share your info with. Not sure if this is actually practical. Just a hunch on a potential solution.

Sure you can - store social graph data on users local machine or some trusted third party, ship the social media application code to the data.

&quot;It&#x27;s not okay to allow a third party to access the data your friends have shared with you without your friends consenting.&quot;Facebook itself is a third party.

When i add phone numbers to my phones contact list i don’t expect Apple to own it. And if i want another app to use my contacts on my phone I’m ok with that. I think opening up the social graph via API would be essential to real competition and a wealth of other apps and companies can be created. Granular access can be given so that isn’t exploited. They have the funds needed to build it out from their billions of profits.

wow, that&#x27;s the &quot;non proliferation&quot; argument. it&#x27;s the first time I see it applied since the cold war. I guess I should have expected it. it&#x27;s the nuclear warhead equivalent argument when you&#x27;re justifying a monoply

This is pretty rich consider that people don&#x27;t even hesitate to put your literal face on Facebook whenever they please.The point is to move toward standards around social data and then force the big tech companies to allow each user to export their own data, quickly, in these interoperable formats.

This.The counter-argument to this is having the government provide the graph and an API to allow networks like Facebook connect to it. This should rightly terrify just about everybody.I like the concept Diaspora had back in the day, it just wasn&#x27;t workable really as your mum&#x2F;aunt&#x2F;non-tech friend wouldn&#x27;t be able to understand how something like that works and would ultimately lose&#x2F;delete&#x2F;corrupt their tokens.

&gt; There&#x27;s no way to provide access to the social graph in a privacy preserving way. It&#x27;s not okay to allow a third party to access the data your friends have shared with you without your friends consenting.If the API is open and there&#x27;s forced interoperability, the client device can call the service&#x27;s API directly with the user&#x27;s own credentials. No need for a third-party middleman, so no need to give a third-party access to the data.It can work the same way IM applications like Pidgin work: one app, multiple accounts.

&gt; It&#x27;s not okay to allow a third party to access the data your friends have shared with you without your friends consenting.Why? If they shared it with me, that should mean they trust me to decide to whom I delegate the access no? I could as well just screenshot it and post it to twitter, what does make the social graph so special?

I heard the same argument about providing personal health data, then CMS eventually started pushing Project Blue Button [0] allowing users to get api access to their own data. And that’s helped quite a bit.There is risk, but saying that users can’t be trusted with an API to their own social graph seems to be throwing the baby out with the bath water.[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.healthit.gov&#x2F;topic&#x2F;health-it-initiatives&#x2F;blue-button" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.healthit.gov&#x2F;topic&#x2F;health-it-initiatives&#x2F;blue-bu...</a>

There&#x27;s no way to provide access to the social graph in a privacy preserving way. It&#x27;s not okay to allow a third party to access the data your friends have shared with you without your friends consenting.Unencumbered API access to the social graph is exactly what led to the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and promising to restrict API access was part of Facebook&#x27;s settlement with the FTC.

I agree, and as a counter argument to most of the below threads, its worth noting that the Social Graph is likely to be consider a public good at some point in the future.These are not the creations of Facebook or Google, any more than Anemometer (1) manufacturers should own the shipping forecast.(1) The spinney half-ball things that measure wind speed.

The link mentions adversarial interoperability for ad blockers, which made me really remember how bad the ad landscape used to be. Crazy amounts of popups, ads that crashed your browser, the explorer shell, or the whole computer, seemingly recursive popups that you had to force-quit the browser to get out of... Sure, I still use an ad blocker, but it seems like have been forced to realize that if they want any of the advertising pie, they need to meet a minimal standard of playing nice with the user.

You get that congress isn&#x27;t a single actor and that there are people in congress who do, right?

Imagine congress understanding a word you just said.

You know, the principle is hard to justify in some ways, but thinking back, some of the fastest and best innovation I&#x27;ve seen came about when the people making interoperable software were ahead of the companies trying to shut it down.

the social graph isn&#x27;t all that valuable to outsiders. anyone determined enough can scrape it without permission anyway. no one else can do much with it except maybe intelligence agencies which were already voluntarily given root access a long time ago.the main economic value of it is to serve ads on Facebook dot com. that&#x27;s it. that&#x27;s how they make 100% of their earnings.

Separating companies, while certainly a more blunt instrument, is far more broadly applicable when it comes to anti-trust enforcement than it is to come up with a specific policy proposal on a per-company basis. The latter would require an act of Congress each time a company went too far, and Congress moves too slowly, is too divided, and doesn&#x27;t have the bandwidth to individually address every anti-trust situation with a new law.

Yes, can’t we have an email equivalent of social graphs and interaction that can be driven by open standards?I am sure people have thought about this.All the Government needs to do is to enforce compliance to such standards.

I doubt most lawmakers dealing with this know what Internet is, let alone API.

Good Idea ... It solves the critical problem of turning people into products.

I don&#x27;t believe it works in practice. I remember CableCARDs and Tivo, what a disaster that was. Comcast came to my house 3 times and never got the CableCARD to work right, so I gave up and just took their DVR. I imagine an interoperable API would have all sorts of problems, bugs, timeouts, etc. and the company would just claim they are doing what the law requires.

I feel like instead of pushing for the companies to separate, congress should pass laws mandating [adversarial interoperability](<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2019&#x2F;10&#x2F;adversarial-interoperability" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.eff.org&#x2F;deeplinks&#x2F;2019&#x2F;10&#x2F;adversarial-interopera...</a>). Then the data (including the social graph) really would belong to the users, and facebook would have to compete with multiple other “social network clients” that would rapidly emerge. Facebook would lose some monopoly profits, but in the long-run they might even make more money - they have a lot of very smart practical engineers (at least based on seeing their approach to writing libraries e.g. react vs angular, pytorch vs tensorflow etc.) So if forced to compete, I think they would do just fine, particularly because I believe that the ecosystem would develop faster in the presence of real, and actually grow the market beyond what it would otherwise be.

FTC Sues Facebook for Illegal Monopolization