Didn’t people use to feel the same about newspapers, phone directories, and network television?
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FTC Accuses Facebook of Social Media Monopoly, Calls for Divestiture of Instagram and WhatsApp
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I’m one of those anti-trust and monopolistic deniers. Putting aside that Apple’s market share is one of the lowest world-wide between all adopted technologies, what I don’t like is that they don’t seem to take the consumer into account on that front: all these lawsuits might do whatever they want as long as me as a costumer don‘t lose the comfort and dev capabilities for a measly $100 a year, i.e, wouldn’t want to roll back to the 90s where hundreds of thousands of dollars were not uncommon for dev kits aggregated costs.
HOWEVER, I don’t get this one either, it’s not like Instagram, Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp are the only options available to us... there’s Signal, Telegram, iMessages, Discord, Slack, Mattermost, HipChat, off the top of my head. There’s every app around that‘s either meant for chatting or has decided to sandwich in chat too... I forgot Teams and Zoom also have chat capabilities. I don’t get this lawsuit either.
In my country, even government institutions are using whatsapp. And no, they don't use other services like Signal etc. Due to the critical mass of users, you just have to have whatsapp if you want to be able to communicate. It's not an option anymore.
It's already integrated into the society/market. It is impossible for a new platform to just come in and be competitive.
With that logic, then the only way people stop using FB and the likes is there's a completely new and innovative service that supplanted everything that FB does. If it's just another social media platform, that won't do because FB has reached critical mass in user adoption.
That, or the government itself ban Facebook (like China). Try living in China without Wechat.
What many people are dismissing is the Facebook users are everyone in here ... ok ok, so some people may have "cancelled" their Facebook accounts which is an option for everyone single Facebook user, but hell, even my 90 year old grandmother has a Facebook account, and she posts on it. This is users choice, if there was a better social media platform, then people would flock to it ... We made it, we can bring it down on our choice, Instagram and WhatsApp are not competing products, I don't check Instagram to see what someone is up to ... I use WhatsApp to chat with friends who are mostly international and bigger groups of people. I think this lawsuit is completely ridiculous and one that the government shouldn't waste their time or money on ...
My point was more that there are a lot of things we used to think were too deeply engrained to change and which now aren’t. “Completely new and innovative” might just be a stronger version of the word I would use, which is “better” or “preferred”.
If your government is making a private business the only means of communicating with your government then I don’t think the problem is the company so much as the government...
Just read in the New York Times that Facebook's stock only fell 2% with this announcement. Shows you how little faith the market has in the U.S. governments' teeth. I mean, when was the last time a company faced this level of monopoly scrutiny, the bell system? Not to mention most of the baby bells were allowed to merge together again and form new giants in the 90s/2000s. The U.S. has barely fought monopolies for the better part of the last half century. It will be interesting to see how this goes.
Ok, make Facebook pay to fund a competitor. Rebuild MySpace... have it take an approach opposite Facebook. Tailor it to human beings. No algorithms, no tracking, no data collection. There you go, they're Caterpillar and Ferrari. Not really competitors, serving two different demographics, but both can dominate in their fields and ensure regardless of which one excels, neither will drive the other out of existence, but both have a safety net ensuring both their survival. The only way both their user bases fail is if they both fail together. A murder-suicide pact.
We need another Theodore Roosevelt. He would have a field day with these corporations-Not just tech..
And nothing of Disney (HULU, ESPN, ABC, etc...), Time Warner (DIrectTV and HBO), Scripps Media, etc.
You see the FTC lets media companies grow large but comes after FaceBook.
Mind you, I'm no FB fan, but what's fair is fair. This is not!
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More likely Apple Media (Music, TV, News) could be forcibly split from Computers...
Nobody argues about Apple regularly buying _small_ companies to acquire technology.
The key difference is that Apple still is by far not the biggest player in any of the markets it is playing in. not even the phones: Android based devices sell much more units than Apple.
And that makes all the difference: you can't extend a monopoly if you don't have one to start with.
But Apple haters are gonna hate.
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Yes, they must separate these. Now even if you don’t have Facebook and you are Instagram or WhatsApp user, all your data ends up with Facebook, which needs to stop.
One could also argue that whatever Apple has inside their App Store cannot possibly ever be considered a monopoly as the Apple App Stores only exist on Apple devices which themselves have plenty of competition that sells in greater numbers.
If you start to divide it up by the store it quickly becomes ridiculous as Target would also have a monopoly inside Target Stores, Walmart would have one in their stores, even the local mom-and-pop grocery store has a monopoly in their tiny corner store in that case.
Of course Apple rules the Apple App store - just like any other store owner rules their own store.
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I’d love to see Apple contribute more to this ass-kicking. Right now, they’re killing Facebook’s revenue generation by blocking tracking, both directly in Safari and in apps and with Sign In With Apple by creating an alternative to Facebook’s monopoly on website logins. These actions are crippling Facebook’s business model that can intimately know billions of people and sell that data to advertisers. Without that, Facebook as a company doesn’t exist.
What’s missing is on the other side, offering solutions that people go to Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp for. I’m not suggesting Apple create a social network but building in social functions into the Apple ecosystem would go a long way.
Apple Music allows you to share music with friends but it’s not fully fleshed out. The Photos app has sharing features but they’re too anemic and iMessage is everyone’s preferred messaging system but if just one of your friends or family members is on Android, then everyone has to use WhatsApp.
Apple needs to find a way to make all of these services universally available. Web apps on iCloud.com would allow Android and Windows users to participate in Apple users’ playground and kill the need for a lot of what drives people to Facebook’s apps despite hating the company.
What’s missing is on the other side, offering solutions that people go to Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp for. I’m not suggesting Apple create a social network but building in social functions into the Apple ecosystem would go a long way.
Apple Music allows you to share music with friends but it’s not fully fleshed out. The Photos app has sharing features but they’re too anemic and iMessage is everyone’s preferred messaging system but if just one of your friends or family members is on Android, then everyone has to use WhatsApp.
Apple needs to find a way to make all of these services universally available. Web apps on iCloud.com would allow Android and Windows users to participate in Apple users’ playground and kill the need for a lot of what drives people to Facebook’s apps despite hating the company.
So does Target, Walmart, and the local mom-and-pop: they control what is sold in their stores. They don't even use rules and can change at will for whatever reason to carry a product or not. They will not even give any reason at all for replacing products they carry.
They also get paid to give "better" shelves to those who give them more margin on the products and much worse.
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Using iMessage is much more problematic in some parts of the world where Whatsapp has a much more universal user base and iMesssage hardly registers even among iPhone users.
iMessage was originally intended to do that but Apple lost one of these lawsuits from an ambulance chasing frivolous patent holding troll... Ruining it for everybody else.
18,5 billion profit in 2019. Impressive.
I guess most of it is from ad-money spent by young guns trying to sell "how to get rich instantly" online courses...
I guess most of it is from ad-money spent by young guns trying to sell "how to get rich instantly" online courses...
Of how many states are suing FB ... how many sued Microsoft in the late 90’s? 13/16? They lost out due to a move Bill Gates did while still CEO at Microsoft, so I’m curious if there is any recourse that FB will/can do to avoid the breakup and still own WhatsApp and Instagram. I praying they loose and rigid rules that force the breakup determine no direct/i—direct investment or decision making from ANY staff at FB is done with IG/WhatsApp. Moreover FORCE the REMOVAL of messaging integration with FB ... EVERYTIME I launch IG it’s bugging me to link with FB which I’ll NEVER use again!
Grrrr.
Neither did I actually. But it looks like some good change will happen
