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Meta antitrust trial kicks off in federal court

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431 points c420 | 3 comments | 14 Apr 25 13:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.017s | source
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henryfjordan ◴[14 Apr 25 19:16 UTC] No.43685057[source]▶
> "The FTC's lawsuit against Meta defies reality. The evidence at trial will show what every 17-year-old in the world knows: Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp compete with Chinese-owned TikTok, YouTube, X, iMessage and many others," Meta spokesperson Chris Sgro said in a statement.

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.

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fallingknife ◴[14 Apr 25 20:14 UTC] No.43685820[source]▶
It was a tiny 1 billion dollar acquisition of a company with less than 50 employees. If everyone knew at the time how dominant Instagram would become, that "everyone" sure didn't include the founders and investors in Instagram.
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henryfjordan ◴[14 Apr 25 20:26 UTC] No.43685937[source]▶
Facebook, wary of someone doing to them what they did to MySpace, was going around buying anyone who might be the next thing. It wasn't necessarily clear that Insta would blow up in the way it did but it was clear that was Facebook's motivation for buying.

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.

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thegreatpeter ◴[14 Apr 25 20:51 UTC] No.43686184[source]▶
Mira just raised $2B for her company pre-revenue and pre-product.
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1. wongarsu ◴[14 Apr 25 21:24 UTC] No.43686479[source]▶
Tech valuations were lower across the board in 2012. Meta 15x'd its market cap since then, and Google 10x'd its valuation, despite both companies still holding essentially the same market position today as they did back then. If anything both have a weaker position today than in 2012.
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2. henryfjordan ◴[14 Apr 25 21:51 UTC] No.43686707[source]▶
Meta's position is much better, they own Insta and Whatsapp now! Diversification!

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).

3. zeroonetwothree ◴[14 Apr 25 22:32 UTC] No.43687011[source]▶
Meta revenue also went up 15x (actually maybe more?). So implying the valuation has not risen