Previously the FTC had been running such that, if it could not prove an acquisition was bad it would approve it.
In this case, back in 2012 Instagram was small, didn't charge money, and not considered a competitor to Facebook.
Well, we sure as hell know now it was a bad idea. Harmed consumer privacy, removed other competitors, and expanded the network effect of then Facebook.
And before anyone says "oh what about YouTube, X, TikTok, competitors" - Yes they should all be split off from their parent companies too.
giancarlostoro 4 days ago [-]
My favorite was that the deal was where Facebook agreed not to import IG into FB. They have merged the two together so much so that if Facebook has a complete outage, so does IG. Not only that, but Facebook "magically" knows when I'm on IG and vice versa.
transcriptase 4 days ago [-]
Much like when a company is acquired and the execs of the acquisition assure everyone that nothing is going to change.
Until it inevitably and drastically does because those execs no longer have any real power even if they weren’t explicitly lying.
tialaramex 4 days ago [-]
Oh yeah, lots of "First Time?" meme opportunities during acquisition.
granzymes 4 days ago [-]
>deal was where Facebook agreed not to import IG into FB
What deal was this?
captn3m0 4 days ago [-]
This was for WhatsApp
pdpi 4 days ago [-]
> They have merged the two together so much so that if Facebook has a complete outage, so does IG.
If AWS has a complete outage, so do many completely unrelated businesses. As a regulator, "running on the same infrastructure" would be the least of my worries and an acceptable carve-out for a "no integration" clause.
zelphirkalt 4 days ago [-]
Running on separate infrastructure makes it a lot easier to confirm for an auditor, that data is not being merged or used in combination though.
notyourwork 3 days ago [-]
And now I’ve noticed threads permeate IG to cross-pollinate.
alex1138 4 days ago [-]
Also I think if you sign up for Instagram you get Threads lol
Nice account you got there, would be a shame if you deleted Threads and also deletes your Insta
soco 3 days ago [-]
But on my Android I got no Threads. True, IG tries their best to convince me to install it. Maybe I don't have it because my IG was created before times?
joey_spaztard 4 days ago [-]
Also, Facebook/Meta said they would not be able to link WhatsApp accounts to facebook accounts. After they were allowed to buy WhatsApp they unsurprisingly began using metadata for things like knowing who Facebook users are talking to.
They paid some fines that they show no sign of caring about.
drivingmenuts 3 days ago [-]
I don't think the people running the FTC care what happens so long as they land a huge sum of money to satisfy their boss. I suspect the FTC is not long for this world anyway and after this, it'll be a much more direct threat. Maybe I'm too paranoid and pessimistic, but a year ago that wouldn't even have been a consideration. Now, it's a possibility.
paulddraper 4 days ago [-]
The FTC signed off on the acquisition.
Now they have third party buyers remorse.
dtquad 4 days ago [-]
This anti-big-tech hysteria in the US is dangerous. Applying early 20th antitrust thinking to modern tech companies is short sighted and doesn't show the whole picture. These American big tech companies that people like Steve Bannon and Lina Khan want to split up have been responsible for not only the impressive US GDP and wealth recovery and growth since the 2008 financial crisis but also for much of the rest of the world's wealth recovery and growth since the 2008 crisis.
Danish pension funds have 25% allocation on US stocks but ~70% of the total returns in 2022-2024 came from US stocks with big tech companies leading the charge.
KoolKat23 3 days ago [-]
Inequality is growing massively, it is also not necessarily the best use of capital, whilst this growth may be big, if it were not so concentrated it would likely be even larger. Concentration of capital leads to inefficiency, a small but relevant example, large mansions and super yachts. The marginal propensity to consume also needs to be considered, we live in a demand driven world.
ethbr1 3 days ago [-]
Indeed. I'd argue that failing to apply robust antitrust enforcement (as the US hasn't in the last 20 years) is short-sighted.
It creates monolithic companies that are enormously profitable at the cost of innovation.
Fewer huge companies will never innovate as quickly as a diverse and competitive ecosystem, especially when the cost to develop and deliver is minimal.
Seen another way, the current Big Tech landscape creates artificial barriers that limit startups' access to customers compared to what the internet and mobile previously enabled.
philipallstar 3 days ago [-]
> Fewer huge companies will never innovate as quickly as a diverse and competitive ecosystem, especially when the cost to develop and deliver is minimal.
It's not clear that this is true. Facebook produces a load of stuff out of its R&D budget that wouldn't be possible in 100 smaller companies.
KoolKat23 2 days ago [-]
This doesn't change the fact that they cause societal problems operating at this scale. Should we be building their vision of the future or societies consensus vision of it?
ethbr1 3 days ago [-]
I'd respectfully disagree.
The advantages of monolithic R&D driven by a profit engine are (1) funding scale & (2) longer-term planning.
The disadvantages are (3) leadership tunnel-vision (e.g. $$$$ to build the shittiest metaverse) & (4) political inertia (e.g. greenfield R&D being subject to high-level BigCo political jockeying, like Microsoft's killing anything internal that threatened Windows/Office revenue).
It's far from all-positive, and debatably less effective than making a larger number of more diverse bets and then letting customers decide which is best.
E.g. Facebook never would have created something as alien as TikTok
philipallstar 3 days ago [-]
I'm not saying it's all positive. I'm countering something that says it's all negative. And TikTok is more like Facebook than a small startup.
ethbr1 3 days ago [-]
TikTok is more like Facebook now, but the genesis of it in Douyin isn't something Facebook would have considered.
For the same reason that Microsoft of yore would have never considered Office-online. (Why would anyone want a word processor on the web?)
Institutional blind spots are dangerous.
kentm 3 days ago [-]
Driving high levels of the total returns off of a handful of advertisement companies doesn’t seem good or sustainable IMO. But
dtquad 3 days ago [-]
In that regard the Danish pension funds are actually playing it safer than our neighbors. The Norwegian Sovereign Wealth Fund, the largest of its kind in the world, is 40% US equities (read: US tech stocks) and 10% US private equity (read: more US tech).
Some Norwegians are starting to be concerned but only because they think Trump will seize their assets.
sc68cal 4 days ago [-]
"monopolies are good because line goes up"
dtquad 4 days ago [-]
>monopolies
Where exactly? They lose market share to every new AI wrapper app and most young people are on the Chinese video app.
>are good because line goes up
The "line goes up" sarcasm really doesn't work when we are actually suddenly in a "line goes down" situation and it clearly sucks.
officeplant 3 days ago [-]
The line going down is just a return to reality hopefully. So many vastly over valued tech stocks and tech adjacent stocks.
const_cast 3 days ago [-]
> The "line goes up" sarcasm really doesn't work
No it still works, because "but make a lot of money!" is _never_ an acceptable argument for anything. It may be a supplemental argument, but you need something else to be the foundation. Making a lot of money doesn't explain why something is good or why we should do it over other things.
I mean, we can make a lot of money through theft, or selling tobacco, maybe legalizing heroin. But those things are bad.
grg0 4 days ago [-]
So weird seeing him dressed up without his redpilled-Zuck-style over-sized t-shirt.
justonceokay 4 days ago [-]
Ed Hardy isn’t a good look for him
giancarlostoro 4 days ago [-]
Assuming Mark Zuckerberg coughs up 30 billion somehow, who gets that money? Like really, and where does it go to? Serious question.
AlotOfReading 4 days ago [-]
As far as I'm aware, the FTC's collections are unencumbered, so they just go into the general fund along with things like taxes. That's used to finance the basic and ongoing operations of the federal government. Collections by other agencies are sometimes earmarked by Congress to do things like set aside x% of collections to fund further enforcement actions or divert a bit into something like the SEC's whistleblower fund.
philipallstar 3 days ago [-]
The bureaucracy must expand to meet the needs of the expanding bureaucracy.
transcriptase 4 days ago [-]
The treasury. It basically means 30 billion fewer dollars will need to be conjured for outgoing payments.
dylan604 4 days ago [-]
Oh look, here's how we can pay for that tax cut for the über wealthy! Thanks Zuck!!
zelphirkalt 4 days ago [-]
It could be well invested in areas preventing social media addiction, like education for example.
4 days ago [-]
CyberDildonics 4 days ago [-]
"Who gets it" and "where does it go" are the same question.
SecretDreams 4 days ago [-]
Trump's kids?
brandall10 4 days ago [-]
"Zuckerberg offered much less and hoped Trump would back him up."
I wouldn't be surprised if a certain amount was offered through backchannels to his family, and someway, somehow, Trump didn't have the influence over this case like was expected.
potato3732842 3 days ago [-]
If you're looking to open a factory or build an apartment (or any other single digit million dollar thing that some government official can discretionarily double the cost of by being obstinate and forcing you to drag them through court) building one of the first things you do is internet stalk the key government officials figure out who their friends are and kick off a bunch of $200-2000 donations to whatever stuff the people around them are involved in (middle school drama club, local animal shelter, etc, etc).
With hundreds of millions at stake I would be very surprised if they weren't doing this and more.
rvz 4 days ago [-]
Microsoft will be targeted last, [0] with good reason. (They know how to avoid anti-trust scrutiny the best).
This is why Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta have all been targeted first, before building a huge case for Microsoft.
Again, it won't be easy as the FTC and the DOJ have failed to break Microsoft up many times.
What would be the actual case against them these days? They've lost their dominant position in nearly everything except desktop OS, if they're being anticompetitive they're doing a pretty bad job of it.
ece 4 days ago [-]
Whatsapp and Instagram only compete with others if you can convince others to install another app and switch to it. Switching phones is easier, so is whatever else you personally use by far. I'm glad beeper exists, but it shouldn't have taken this long for it to exist. Only one way to reduce harmful network effects, give users more choice.
thaumasiotes 4 days ago [-]
> “We haven’t been shy about explaining why it doesn’t make sense for the FTC to bring a case to trial that requires it to prove something every 17-year-old in America knows is absurd—that Instagram doesn’t compete with TikTok,” she said.
In this hypothetical scenario:
1. Instagram competes with TikTok, winning a minority share of the market.
2. The government decrees that TikTok is anathema and expels them from the market.
3. The government sues Instagram for having a supermajority share of the remaining market.
I feel like there should be a form of estoppel preventing the argument.
specialist 3 days ago [-]
> I feel like there should be a form of estoppel preventing the argument.
Agreed. Alas, our SCOTUS would never limit themselves in that way.
thaumasiotes 3 days ago [-]
What are you trying to say? Estoppel isn't a limit on the court.
dtquad 4 days ago [-]
Maybe apps that take less than 3 minutes for a 17-year-old to install, register account, and learn how to use, are not really defensible "monopolies" and maybe these apps shouldn't be the target of antitrust laws that were intended for early 20th century robber barons.
barnabee 3 days ago [-]
The network effects, economies of scale, and associated ability to plough huge profits into buying up and out-promoting competitors absolutely make them monopolies.
4 days ago [-]
theideaofcoffee 4 days ago [-]
Get fucked, Zuck. I hope the knee-bending was worth it! I also hope that any case (as one could be pretty sure there will be litigation over it) in the future finds in favor of the commission. The fine can't be big enough for the shit it's put the world through.
valeg 4 days ago [-]
Trump is offended by measly sums which Zuck has put in his pocket. Anti-trust crusade is a perfect way to shake more from him. Give the bully an inch, he will take a mile.
1vuio0pswjnm7 3 days ago [-]
"FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson found the offer not credible, and wasn't ready to settle for anything less than $18 billion and a consent decree."
"Former FTC Chair Lina Khan told the Journal that the company's $450 million settlement offer was "delusional.""
OsrsNeedsf2P 4 days ago [-]
People saying Zuck's ass kissing didn't work are missing the point. If it even has a 1 in 10 chance of working, it's worth it
dylan604 4 days ago [-]
If you're going to be an ass kisser, you can't do it half way. You gotta make the ass being kissed like it's the only ass you'll ever kiss again. Phony ass kissing is so obvious that the ass being kissed is insulted even more. At that point, you'd have been better off doing nothing
lazide 3 days ago [-]
God, I miss Weyoun. The things he could teach these amateurs.
kashunstva 3 days ago [-]
> it's worth it
Only after factoring out the effects of your integrity and self-respect. But I suppose that in Meta’s case we can assume that sort of pre-discounting of character was already done.
xnx 3 days ago [-]
> Only after factoring out the effects of your integrity and self-respect.
I'd definitely sell these for my first billion, but probably not my Nth.
9283409232 4 days ago [-]
It would be hilarious if Zuckerberg spent all this time kissing Trump's ass only for him to not care and the FTC wins against Meta.
Apocryphon 4 days ago [-]
Before departing, Lina Khan slips him a memo suggesting that the Facebook Feed undercuts Truth Social
As your article states, even in 2022 this was done as well. Restricting China from getting top of the line GPUs is nothing new or unique to the current administration.
JustExAWS 4 days ago [-]
The difference is that Nvidia actually worked with the previous administration, had enough time to design chips that met the requirements and wasn’t stuck holding inventory.
9283409232 4 days ago [-]
The sooner big business learns you don't play ball with fascist the better.
yks 4 days ago [-]
Not holding my breath, Weimar industrialists were backing the conservative-Nazi alliance until conservatives were all gone. Modern American barons are of the same foreseeing capabilities (unless they’re Thiel who wants monarchy or whatever).
techpineapple 4 days ago [-]
geez, like three days ago I though NVIDIA was saved, now not, let's see what happens tomorrow.
ragnot 4 days ago [-]
I'm sure it was always the plan. Trump never forgives but he wants to humiliate and lure in before he strikes
mattnewton 4 days ago [-]
A big looming federal court case or judgement gives Trump leverage, why would he intervene so soon?
4 days ago [-]
blcknight 4 days ago [-]
Looks like all the bending the knee to Trump didn't work out so well for Zuck.
Mistletoe 4 days ago [-]
There is this silver lining to all the tech boot licking, it didn't even work. They should have just stood their ground, what was your soul worth, Jeff, Mark, etc.?
onemoresoop 4 days ago [-]
You seem to imply these billios had a soul in the first place. I really doubt that’s the case.
bloomingeek 4 days ago [-]
I'm not sure if they have a soul either. However, they hate losing money! Which we can call motivation to fight back in ways that us normals can't. After Elon loses enough money we may see a political divorce of epic proportions, that will be very entertaining to watch. (Can you imagine what it will be like if trump threatens the Starlink contracts?!?)
zelphirkalt 4 days ago [-]
Those souls were sold a looong time ago.
dylan604 4 days ago [-]
The bending of the knee wasn't followed by a briefcase full of cash, or a large enough donation to the campaign/library fund, or not enough meme coin purchase. Maybe he should have shown up to Mar-a-lago wearing a Trump watch carrying a Trump bible. In other words, Zuck didn't come across as truly loyal in his meetings with Trump.
bloomingeek 4 days ago [-]
Well put, perhaps this could be the beginning of a super rich person rebelling against the current administration? Goodness knows somebody needs to, or he will run them all over until it's time to completely burn the rest of us who don't have the means to defend ourselves in court. If recent news is to be believed from major networks simply reporting what trump says, NOTHING is beyond his contempt for anyone who doesn't bend the knee, which is un-american.
zelphirkalt 4 days ago [-]
How I would hate to see Zuck of all people be displayed as some kind of key figure in resisting fascism. The enabler of ethnic purges, proven criminal, put up on whatever kind of pedestal. And then the silly people forever reminding me of it by saying something along the lines: "But look, he did something with his money! He got us freedom back!" or some other BS. Maybe I should already practice restraint, just in case.
bloomingeek 3 days ago [-]
Ha, you're absolutely right! (Let's also not forget how FB literally steals everyone's privacy who uses the app.) I wouldn't worry about getting teased about the zuckster doing anything helpful, on NPR this morning they revealed he offered the trump administration 450 million dollars(!) to call the whole thing off, which they refused.
For those of us who haven't drank the GOP kool-aid, practiced restraint is now a way of life.
dylan604 4 days ago [-]
Isn’t that pretty much the playbook though? The younger evil villain slays the older evil villain to take its place? Just because one slays the evil ruler doesn’t mean they are just themselves.
mock-possum 4 days ago [-]
it never does
Apocryphon 4 days ago [-]
So much for the vaccine skepticism as free speech virtue signaling
alex1138 3 days ago [-]
The people/person who flagged my reply: care to elaborate? It's someone from industry. She's not wrong, you are
alex1138 4 days ago [-]
[flagged]
amazingamazing 4 days ago [-]
just ban all acquisitions and stop the charades. all acquisitions will be anti competitive if they succeed anyway
SoftTalker 4 days ago [-]
I take it you don’t work in a startup.
onemoresoop 4 days ago [-]
That’s the sole reason most startups exist, the hope for payday by acquisition..
techpineapple 4 days ago [-]
That might be amazing.
semiquaver 4 days ago [-]
What? How would that work?
jprd 4 days ago [-]
Startups would try and build a profitable business instead of aiming for an acquisition.
Or do you mean preventing the acquisitions in a legal manner?
esafak 4 days ago [-]
There is nothing wrong with acquisitions. It's one way big companies rejuvenate, and startups get a liquidity event. And if it's not an acquihire, the product can get broader distribution. Some companies are started to be acquired; their product of value mostly to big companies.
barnabee 3 days ago [-]
Why not let big companies die and be replaced by startups if the only way they can succeed is by [ab]using their incumbent position to “rejuvenate” (a euphemism if ever I saw one!)?
It would stop worse products winning as a result of resources gained through prior successes (and monopolistic practices).
In fact, I’d be happy to see a situation where sufficiently unrelated businesses have to be sold off after some grace period even if they were developed in house.
soraminazuki 3 days ago [-]
That's some euphemistic way of saying that monopolies can get even bigger without even any pretense of competition. We all know where this ends. The monopolists win big and consumers will have to suck it up.
philipallstar 3 days ago [-]
No, it means the company can succeed and the service they built has a chance to continue. The choice isn't "be acquired or enter a Nirvana" it's often "be acquired or die".
const_cast 3 days ago [-]
Yes, and we need a lot more death in the tech company space. The problem is we have a lot of companies that are just bad, stupid ideas that are allowed to survive because they're on life support. We just dump hundreds of millions in marketings to cover up the shit product. And then we purposefully operate at a loss to flood the market, aka defrauding consumers, to cover up the shit product.
And then, like 12 years later, after our anti-competitive practices have paid off and we have 90% market share, we jump our prices 200% and drop our quality as we enter our robber baron business strategy.
All of this, because the shit company didn't die when it's time came. Instead, like a zombie, it now feeds on the brains of consumers that have no where else to turn.
soraminazuki 3 days ago [-]
It's the same thing. What you're describing is called embrace, extend, and extinguish. Or the more modern variant of embrace, extend, and enshittify.
philipallstar 3 days ago [-]
Well no, if you don't have money to continue, that's not someone killing you.
Rendered at 15:32:36 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Previously the FTC had been running such that, if it could not prove an acquisition was bad it would approve it.
In this case, back in 2012 Instagram was small, didn't charge money, and not considered a competitor to Facebook.
Well, we sure as hell know now it was a bad idea. Harmed consumer privacy, removed other competitors, and expanded the network effect of then Facebook.
And before anyone says "oh what about YouTube, X, TikTok, competitors" - Yes they should all be split off from their parent companies too.
Until it inevitably and drastically does because those execs no longer have any real power even if they weren’t explicitly lying.
What deal was this?
If AWS has a complete outage, so do many completely unrelated businesses. As a regulator, "running on the same infrastructure" would be the least of my worries and an acceptable carve-out for a "no integration" clause.
Nice account you got there, would be a shame if you deleted Threads and also deletes your Insta
They paid some fines that they show no sign of caring about.
Now they have third party buyers remorse.
Danish pension funds have 25% allocation on US stocks but ~70% of the total returns in 2022-2024 came from US stocks with big tech companies leading the charge.
It creates monolithic companies that are enormously profitable at the cost of innovation.
Fewer huge companies will never innovate as quickly as a diverse and competitive ecosystem, especially when the cost to develop and deliver is minimal.
Seen another way, the current Big Tech landscape creates artificial barriers that limit startups' access to customers compared to what the internet and mobile previously enabled.
It's not clear that this is true. Facebook produces a load of stuff out of its R&D budget that wouldn't be possible in 100 smaller companies.
The advantages of monolithic R&D driven by a profit engine are (1) funding scale & (2) longer-term planning.
The disadvantages are (3) leadership tunnel-vision (e.g. $$$$ to build the shittiest metaverse) & (4) political inertia (e.g. greenfield R&D being subject to high-level BigCo political jockeying, like Microsoft's killing anything internal that threatened Windows/Office revenue).
It's far from all-positive, and debatably less effective than making a larger number of more diverse bets and then letting customers decide which is best.
E.g. Facebook never would have created something as alien as TikTok
For the same reason that Microsoft of yore would have never considered Office-online. (Why would anyone want a word processor on the web?)
Institutional blind spots are dangerous.
Some Norwegians are starting to be concerned but only because they think Trump will seize their assets.
Where exactly? They lose market share to every new AI wrapper app and most young people are on the Chinese video app.
>are good because line goes up
The "line goes up" sarcasm really doesn't work when we are actually suddenly in a "line goes down" situation and it clearly sucks.
No it still works, because "but make a lot of money!" is _never_ an acceptable argument for anything. It may be a supplemental argument, but you need something else to be the foundation. Making a lot of money doesn't explain why something is good or why we should do it over other things.
I mean, we can make a lot of money through theft, or selling tobacco, maybe legalizing heroin. But those things are bad.
I wouldn't be surprised if a certain amount was offered through backchannels to his family, and someway, somehow, Trump didn't have the influence over this case like was expected.
With hundreds of millions at stake I would be very surprised if they weren't doing this and more.
This is why Google, Apple, Amazon and Meta have all been targeted first, before building a huge case for Microsoft.
Again, it won't be easy as the FTC and the DOJ have failed to break Microsoft up many times.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41475806
In this hypothetical scenario:
1. Instagram competes with TikTok, winning a minority share of the market.
2. The government decrees that TikTok is anathema and expels them from the market.
3. The government sues Instagram for having a supermajority share of the remaining market.
I feel like there should be a form of estoppel preventing the argument.
Agreed. Alas, our SCOTUS would never limit themselves in that way.
"Former FTC Chair Lina Khan told the Journal that the company's $450 million settlement offer was "delusional.""
Only after factoring out the effects of your integrity and self-respect. But I suppose that in Meta’s case we can assume that sort of pre-discounting of character was already done.
I'd definitely sell these for my first billion, but probably not my Nth.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/16/trump_responds_to_nvi...
For those of us who haven't drank the GOP kool-aid, practiced restraint is now a way of life.
Or do you mean preventing the acquisitions in a legal manner?
It would stop worse products winning as a result of resources gained through prior successes (and monopolistic practices).
In fact, I’d be happy to see a situation where sufficiently unrelated businesses have to be sold off after some grace period even if they were developed in house.
And then, like 12 years later, after our anti-competitive practices have paid off and we have 90% market share, we jump our prices 200% and drop our quality as we enter our robber baron business strategy.
All of this, because the shit company didn't die when it's time came. Instead, like a zombie, it now feeds on the brains of consumers that have no where else to turn.