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Meta antitrust trial kicks off in federal court

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431 points c420 | 2 comments | 14 Apr 25 13:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.463s | 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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beepbopboopp[dead post] ◴[15 Apr 25 01:11 UTC] No.43688044[source]▶
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1. samplatt ◴[15 Apr 25 01:30 UTC] No.43688130[source]▶
I'm guessing that there's just a younger audience, now. We'd just been off the back of two decades of MS buying everything it got near, it was just what the done thing was. Instagram was taking serious oxygen away from facebook at the time; the buyout wasn't so much an "everyone knows it" but almost an inevitability.
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2. beepbopboopp ◴[15 Apr 25 16:43 UTC] No.43695350[source]▶
Id partially agree. The historical case that time erased is that early app store, apps were exploding and disappearing just as quickly and the eventual "zero-risk" on network apps was enormous at the time. Everyone agreed with the trajectory, but no one had consensus on the permanence.