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Meta antitrust trial kicks off in federal court

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431 points c420 | 1 comments | 14 Apr 25 13:18 UTC | HN request time: 0.226s | 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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jjallen ◴[14 Apr 25 21:31 UTC] No.43686547[source]▶
This implies that every horizontal acquisition is anti-competitive, does it not? If not I would love to read why not.
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michaelt ◴[14 Apr 25 21:39 UTC] No.43686616[source]▶
If there are 7 different grocery stores in driving distance of my house and two of them merge, I've still got a choice of 6 stores so there's still reasonable competition.

If there are 3 different grocery stores and two of them merge, though? That's a different matter.

And if 1 of the remaining 2 is the zero-waste organic store that only rich people and hippies use? It might not even be providing all that much competition.

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snovymgodym ◴[14 Apr 25 22:06 UTC] No.43686817[source]▶
Yeah, but we're talking about 2012. Instagram was small and wasn't making any money, and feature-wise it barely resembled what it is today. Going just by US sites in 2012 Twitter, Tumblr, Snapchat, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube, and Reddit were all large competing social networks (or social network adjacent sites/apps).

Seems like in your analogy there were plenty of grocery stores left.

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1. input_sh ◴[15 Apr 25 10:18 UTC] No.43690959[source]▶
That's because it was still an iOS-exclusive.

People forget that the Android app and the aquisition announcement came out like one week apart. The basic web version didn't come out until half a year later.

My point is it already had a solid rich, influencer-y userbase + was about to become available on more platforms. Aquisition definitely had an impact on the user growth, but the growth itself was already inevitable.