Meta antitrust trial kicks off in federal court

> Everyone knew at the time that Facebook bought Instagram because it threatened Facebook's dominance, and hindsight shows that exactly that happened.

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.

The conversations at that time were definitely about how Instagram had the heat that Facebook was losing. I felt there was no question that they were neutralizing a competitor.

(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.)

If they bought both Instagram and Snapchat it would have been neutralizing competition. Instagram acquisition was just a business staying relevant after a youth market grew up and soured on them while the next younger ones wanted something else cooler designed for 100% around mobile.

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.

Meta doesn't bother me too much.

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.

If it was some insignificant photo sharing app with 13 employees why did they pay a billion dollars for it? Everyone knew when the sale closed exactly what they were doing.

It all bothers me. Centralization is bad. And if Facebook and Google wanted to just disable somebody's channel or pages, they could.

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.

We can't claim that _everyone_ knew. But it was obvious to anyone paying attention, and also to all of us who bailed out of facebook as they became more toxic.

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.

They tried to buy Snapchat multiple times and the guy refused after seeing how much Facebook valued Instagram and thought he could get more than a billion.

Not everyone on hackernews gets it. There are quite a few people on here involved with or responsible for the awful things that get brought up, but they’re paid enough to actually convince themselves we simply don’t understand why it’s necessary.

It's fun to see everyone arguing about what "everyone" thought.. when... we can just... look... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3817840 is a fun thread from 2012.

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.

Yes it was between the two if I remember correctly. If they bought both it'd be crossing into near total monopoly, at least before Tiktok took off. But they are pretty far from that now IMO. At least in terms of competition from tons of other services. It's possible they did other shady things outside of that.

They were trying to get both, there was no contingency of getting one and not getting the other. Snapchat just refused to be sold for the same price.

The top comment compares it to YouTube.

We have Zuckerberg's emails. No need to claim anything. He said it out loud:

“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,”

Right I looked it up. They bought Instagram in 2012 and tried to buy Snapchat a year later.

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.

Back then Google was trying to be social. Remember Google+?

https://www.joyoftech.com/joyoftech/joyarchives/1523.html

Those people aren't putting in their own money. The people who did put their money into Instagram got to see behind the corporate covers, and they decided to buy anyway. It's very easy to say whether you'd invest $1B if you're not putting in any of your money.

> Remember Google+?

How about Google People? [1]

[1] https://qntm.org/perso

I think you are being selective. I looked at the top 10 top-level comments and by my judgment:

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.

There must’ve been an attorney in that email thread who quickly reached out to him privately to make sure he added another sentence. That’s hilarious.

Since the discussion is entirely about their motivation in buying Instagram, it’s certainly not moot at all. They wanted to have a monopoly and remove the competition. That was the motivation.

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.

> "Where's the money in Instagram?" Preventing Instagram from developing into something that has a negative effect on Facebook. It's a "keep your enemies closer" move.

- Larrys 2012

how about Google Buzz?

https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/introducing-google-b...

Laws, content moderation, and moderation obligations had created an insurmountable barrier to entry to fix that. Though abolishing those hard and soft laws can't be a solution for various reasons.

"Meta doesn't bother me too much."

it is concern for someone outside western hemisphere, in Asia especially META dominance is even stronger

Or they just have a different opinion than you. The GP comment was misleading saying there is "no possible" option due to network effects. You absolutely can upload to rumble or floatplane or other sites that have their own networks. People should be praising YouTubes model to pay the channels for content. In an alternate universe, Microsoft is renting you cloud storage by the gb with 3-tier plans and thousands of people use it to share videos with their families.

HN is notorious for this kind of thing, such as the iPod: "less space than a nomad, no wireless, lame". Due to not understanding how much consumers value simplicity.

> 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.

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.)

> When Facebook acquired it, Instagram was a photo sharing app that had 13 employees.

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.

It's a recurring cognitive dissonance between cynical tech people and the actual mass market. I mean I'm cynical about most things but the ones that aren't and who get onto the hype train earn big money off of it.

You took "everyone" literally but it's actually like "a lot/majority held the opinion/it was easy to see".

The top comment compares it to YouTube as a great acquisition.

> “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

Meta's stuff gets a lot of attention because it's flashy and tied to social media drama, but the structural power of Amazon, YouTube, Apple, and Google is way scarier long-term. They're not just dominating products - they're controlling infrastructure. Distribution, discovery, monetization - the whole stack.

Every time I see a comment accusing HN of having some specific consensual position like a hive mind, I go back and see comments both contradicting and supporting the stance. In other words, different opinions. Every single time I check, and every single time it shows the original commenter engaged in selection bias.

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...

To be fair, the iPod comment was on Slashdot

But it was at 30m users, post inflection point wrt its hockey stick

Facebook knew what it was doing and the emails plainly reflect that

But hindsight of HN is different from hindsight of FaceBook.

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.

> If it was some insignificant photo sharing app with 13 employees why did they pay a billion dollars for it? Everyone knew when the sale closed exactly what they were doing.

If everyone knew, why was the purchase allowed?

What’s surprising to me about the dominance of YouTube is the fact that 1) unlike all the social networks there is very little network effect with YouTube, and 2) there are perfectly to viable alternatively such as Vimeo that are routinely bypassed.

No. Mobile Camera Apps were a threat to non mobile first facebook. ("Instagram is a photo service in a sea of other photo services.")

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.

HP bought palm for 1.2 billion dollars and then did nothing with it. Why is doing something anti competitive but doing nothing not? I’m sure there are other examples than the hp/palm situation.

On the other hand the top ten comments as a whole are 3 bullish, 5 neutral, 2 bearish which is certainly not an overwhelming sentiment in any direction. That's despite the fact that bullish comments on start-ups tend to get more votes because it's a start-up community.

After trying to set up wireless on my printer interface and enter a password with up and down arrows rotating through an entire set of keys, I'm fairly convinced that no wireless on the iPod was massively correct. If people were expected to set up wifi by entering a password with a rotation device adoption would be miniscule.

>HP bought palm for 1.2 billion dollars and then did nothing with it. Why is doing something anti competitive but doing nothing not?

Not sure anyone thinks thats true at all.

Fair, but other than browsing the web, a Blackberry was superior for communications than an iPhone back then.

> When Facebook acquired it, Instagram was a photo sharing app that had 13 employees.

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...

Sure, plenty of people thought that it was a good purchase, but my point is nobody thought of it as buying out their competition. The transition into a social media platform and algorithmic content machine occurred under Facebook's direction.

Facebook was leveraging Onavo at the time to understand growth trends in competitors. They 100% acquired Instagram and WhatsApp because their growth trends posed threats to the Blue app.

Dunno why the internet enjoys dunking so much on a poor anonymous poster who guessed wrong about a product that would catch on, whether that's the iPod, the iPad, Dropbox, etc.

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?").

In the end it doesn’t matter. It matters what Zuckerberg thought.

How about Google Wave ?

https://support.google.com/answer/1083134?hl=en

And Whatsapp still has a small team. It has no bearing on the fact that it is more widespread form of communication than text/call/email etc. all over the world under the control of one evil megacorp.

How about Google Orkut?

https://support.google.com/orkut/?hl=en