[HN Gopher] Judge dismisses FTC antitrust complaint against Face...
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Judge dismisses FTC antitrust complaint against Facebook
Author : ChrisArchitect
Score : 171 points
Date : 2021-06-28 19:17 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnbc.com)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| link to court ruling PDF
|
| https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.224...
| dang wrote:
| I replaced https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27666416 in
| your comment with the URL it points to. That way people can
| click directly to go to the ruling, and we avoid the crankiness
| problem with empty thread links (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRa
| nge=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...). I hope you don't mind!
| spoonjim wrote:
| If you are going to edit people's posts you should have the
| original and edited posts displayed below your post.
| dang wrote:
| It's rare for us to do anything like this. My guess is that
| as long as we tell people that we did it (and why; and as
| long as it was for a good reason), it's not something most
| of the community would object to. I don't think we need to
| build new bureaucratic mechanisms.
|
| In this case, I could avoided it by posting a different
| comment with the same link and pinned that to the top
| instead, but then ChrisArchitect wouldn't be getting the
| karma for their contribution. That seemed unfair. Hence the
| above.
|
| I do sometimes think about building an edit-and-diff
| mechanism for HN comments though! People could suggest
| edits to comments and they could be treated like pull
| requests. I can't tell if this is a great idea that would
| massively improve the threads, or an idiocy. (Edit: I was
| looking for a comment where I mentioned this not long ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25459870, and found
| another one where I mentioned it 7 years ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8214456. That's nuts!)
| spoonjim wrote:
| Yes, but as a matter of policy, all English language
| descriptions of what you did will have some wiggle room
| for interpretation. For something as serious as changing
| another person's words, you should have a special code
| path, like text in a special color that says "edited by
| moderator." Seeing that someone's post was edited
| shouldn't require expanding a reply and interpreting it,
| since editing someone's speech is far more delicate and
| prone to catastrophic outcomes than merely suppressing
| it.
| dang wrote:
| I hear you, but the problem is that such systems also add
| cost, not just benefit. I don't only mean dev and
| maintenance costs (although those too), but the cost to
| the culture of making this place more bureaucratic. We've
| always avoided that. HN is a spirit-of-the-law place, not
| a letter-of-the-law one: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRang
| e=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....
|
| Edit: oh one other point: there will always be "wiggle
| room for interpretation". The idea of eliminating it is a
| fantasy, and trying to build systems to eliminate it is a
| wild goose chase.
| diogenesjunior wrote:
| I think some distinguishing attribute should be displayed
| to show that a comment was edited by someone other than
| the user. It's apparent to me that comments can be
| edited. How can I be certain that mods haven't silently
| edited a comment in the past?
| dang wrote:
| This is the sort of thing I think would be a mistake. I
| posted a clear explanation of what I did and why. I
| believe that's enough to satisfy the community. It does
| leave a tiny minority unsatisfied who don't trust what we
| say, but they are not satisfiable. For example, if we
| added such a feature, how could you be certain that we
| weren't secretly overriding it sometimes? You would
| either have to take our word for it--in which case why
| not just believe us in the first place?--or you would
| need some other system to validate that one. This is how
| you get systems upon systems, with no actual solution,
| for a problem that doesn't even really exist. The same
| issue would recreate itself at every step.
|
| Don't get me wrong - I'm not saying "just trust us".
| Trust is earned. But the way to earn it is to always be
| open to questions, answer them as well as we can, and
| when people point out mistakes, to admit them and fix
| them quickly. That's what we try to do, and it's
| important to see that this is informal and social. Formal
| and technical methods are neither necessary nor
| sufficient for community trust, and it would be a big
| mistake to think otherwise, because it would steal
| resources away from other things, like human-to-human
| communication and making the site itself better, for no
| real gain and a lot of secondary costs.
| [deleted]
| spoonjim wrote:
| You're thinking about the culture of your site, I am
| talking about the rights of your users. Your users create
| the value and deserve it (honestly it should be protected
| by law). If you edit the link and then someone takes over
| the domain and makes it a porn site, that can cause
| direct harm to your users. You need to accept the cost as
| part of the cost of doing business, and if you really
| edit posts very rarely than the bureaucratic impact
| should be minimal.
| dang wrote:
| This strikes me as an archetypal example of the
| legalistic sort of thinking that is popular with a vocal
| minority of internet forum users who like to make
| litigious arguments, look for problems that don't
| actually exist in practice, then demand bureaucratic
| systems to "solve" the "problems". I don't believe that
| we're violating human rights by operating HN, and the
| idea of building software to address such cases as
| "someone taking over the domain and making it a porn
| site" is an example of what I mean by problems that don't
| exist in practice.
|
| I don't mean to pick on you personally--it's a style of
| thinking and arguing that I've encountered on a regular
| basis. Being a moderator, and thus a sort of bureaucrat,
| attracts arguments from the bureaucratically minded. All
| I can tell you is that it's the opposite of how we think
| about HN. In my view it would be an enormous mistake, as
| in potentially fatal, to let this sort of thinking direct
| how we operate HN or what features to add. The way I look
| at it, HN users have a right to an interesting forum that
| doesn't suck (or at least relatively doesn't suck),
| that's a hard problem, and anything that detracts focus
| from it is a really bad idea. I get that you think
| differently and I don't mean to be disrespectful. But
| yes, I am thinking about the culture of HN.
| lwhi wrote:
| I don't think what you did was awful, especially since
| you went to the effort of explaining exactly what was
| changed and why.
|
| However, I also think there should be space for discourse
| about the mechanics of the action; however academic that
| discussion might end up being.
|
| Personally, I think a suggestion to the OP encouraging
| them to edit the post themself might have been a less
| controversial method of achieving the same aim.
| [deleted]
| nightpool wrote:
| I disagree, as a user I think what dang did makes sense and
| was clearly explained to anyone viewing. Whether something
| does or doesn't have special treatment in the software is
| mostly orthogonal to the actual material impact of what
| happened, which was clearly minimal here.
| desperate wrote:
| Not sure how relevant this is since it's a third party app,
| but using Harmonic on mobile the original link would allow me
| to view the PDF without downloading it (albeit after hitting
| an empty HN page) while the direct link requires me to
| download the PDF before viewing.
|
| Tbh I'm just happy to have hacker news, continue as you are.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| yeah fine -- I was trying to account for many ppl just
| sharing/submitting the link to the PDF and a whole discussion
| ending up on that thread instead of here as I saw the PDF
| posted in the wild first
| kyrra wrote:
| I think this is a good TLDR from WSJ:
|
| > Judge Boasberg said the FTC's lawsuit was "legally
| insufficient" because it didn't plead enough allegations to
| support monopolization claims against Facebook. The judge,
| however, said the commission can try again and gave it 30 days to
| attempt to file an amended lawsuit.
| granzymes wrote:
| From the opinion, internal citations omitted:
|
| > The FTC has failed to plead enough facts to plausibly
| establish a necessary element of all of its Section 2 claims --
| namely, that Facebook has monopoly power in the market for
| Personal Social Networking (PSN) Services. The Complaint
| contains nothing on that score save the naked allegation that
| the company has had and still has a "dominant share of th[at]
| market (in excess of 60%)." Such an unsupported assertion might
| (barely) suffice in a Section 2 case involving a more
| traditional goods market, in which the Court could reasonably
| infer that market share was measured by revenue, units sold, or
| some other typical metric. But this case involves no ordinary
| or intuitive market. Rather, PSN services are free to use, and
| the exact metes and bounds of what even constitutes a PSN
| service -- i.e., which features of a company's mobile app or
| website are included in that definition and which are excluded
| -- are hardly crystal clear. In this unusual context, the FTC's
| inability to offer any indication of the metric(s) or method(s)
| it used to calculate Facebook's market share renders its vague
| "60%-plus" assertion too speculative and conclusory to go
| forward.
|
| https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.224...
|
| The court also threw out the similar argument from 46 States
| (and in a way that the States are unlikely to recover from):
|
| > First, the States' Section 2 and Section 7 attacks on
| Facebook's acquisitions are barred by the doctrine of laches,
| which precludes relief for those who sleep on their rights.
| Although Defendant purchased Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in
| 2014, Plaintiffs' suit -- which seeks, in the main, to have
| Facebook divest one or both companies -- was not filed until
| December 2020. The Court is aware of no case, and Plaintiffs
| provide none, where such a long delay in seeking such a
| consequential remedy has been countenanced in a case brought by
| a plaintiff other than the federal government, against which
| laches does not apply and to which the federal antitrust laws
| grant unique authority as sovereign law enforcer. If laches is
| to mean anything, it must apply on these facts, even in a suit
| brought by states.
|
| https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.224...
|
| Relevant to both suits, the Court separately found that the
| argument that Facebook violated antitrust law by revoking API
| access for other apps that duplicated Facebook features lacked
| merit (the policy is not a violation of antitrust law) and came
| too late (the implementation when they revoked access was years
| ago and there is no ongoing misconduct).
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/CEVxC
| ratsmack wrote:
| This makes me wonder if they purposely submitted a weak case to
| appear proactive for political purposes, while knowing it would
| be tossed out. There is a lot of money that flows from big tech
| into the political coffers, so you have to be careful to not
| rock he boat too much.
| Clubber wrote:
| It's certainly plausible. I wonder how many of our
| institutions are really "just for show," like the TSA.
| Y_Y wrote:
| What if we replaced the whole anti-monopoly/pro-competition
| apparatus with a sign that just said "Everything is fine,
| this is the market working as intended."?
| tablespoon wrote:
| > What if we replaced the whole anti-monopoly/pro-
| competition apparatus with a sign that just said
| "Everything is fine, this is the market working as
| intended."?
|
| "This is the market working as intended," does not imply
| "everything is fine."
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > This makes me wonder if they purposely submitted a weak
| case to appear proactive for political purposes, while
| knowing it would be tossed out.
|
| I think its more likely that they were confident that what
| occurred (complaint dismissed with leave to refile) was the
| worst they would get, and the best case was that the court
| would accept the weak and easier to prove claims as
| sufficient fact allegations to support the case.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I wouldn't be suprised that FTC is just a friend. I mean it's
| year 2021, they already figured this out in the 19th century.
| Animats wrote:
| The FTC gets another shot at that, and can probably prevail at
| this level in the next round.
|
| Challenging the acquisitions, though, came too late.
| rvz wrote:
| ...And Facebook reaches $1TN market cap too.
|
| To Downvoters: So Facebook DID NOT reach and close above $1
| trillon dollars in market cap after the dismissal of this
| antitrust complaint? Are you prepared to refute this claim which
| is backed by an article which is from the SAME NEWS SOURCE as the
| one in this thread? [0]
|
| Discuss.
|
| It seems that having any sort of evidence-based logical
| discussion or providing links to a reliable source does not apply
| to this orange site and the illogical downvotes and zero replies
| to this comment prove this.
|
| [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/28/facebook-hits-trillion-
| dolla...
| [deleted]
| flunhat wrote:
| Some choice quotes from the ruling:
|
| > The FTC is apparently unwilling to allege that Facebook has
| ever (pre- or post-Instagram acquisition) had something like 85%
| or even 75% market share; instead it hedges by offering only that
| the number is somewhere north of 60%. The question naturally
| arises: which firms make up the remaining 30-40%? Although
| Plaintiff is correct that it is not required to identify every
| alleged competitor in its pleadings, its choice to identify
| essentially none is striking.
|
| > The Court's decision here does not rest on some pleading
| technicality or arcane feature of antitrust law. Rather, the
| existence of market power is at the heart of any monopolization
| claim. As the Supreme Court explained in Twombly, itself an
| antitrust case, "[A]district court must retain the power to
| insist upon some specificity in pleading before allowing a
| potentially massive factual controversy to proceed." Here, this
| Court must exercise that power. The FTC's Complaint says almost
| nothing concrete on the key question of how much power Facebook
| actually had, and still has, in a properly defined antitrust
| product market. It is almost as if the agency expects the Court
| to simply nod to the conventional wisdom that Facebook is a
| monopolist.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| Also;
|
| > The FTC has failed to plead enough facts to plausibly
| establish a necessary element of all of its Section 2 claims --
| namely, that Facebook has monopoly power in the market for
| Personal Social Networking (PSN) Services. The Complaint
| contains nothing on that score save the naked allegation that
| the company has had and still has a "dominant share of th[at]
| market (in excess of 60%)." Redacted Compl., P 64. Such an
| unsupported assertion might (barely) suffice in a Section 2
| case involving a more traditional goods market, in which the
| Court could reasonably infer that market share was measured by
| revenue, units sold, or some other typical metric. But this
| case involves no ordinary or intuitive market. Rather, PSN
| services are free to use, and the exact metes and bounds of
| what even constitutes a PSN service -- i.e., which features of
| a company's mobile app or website are included in that
| definition and which are excluded -- are hardly crystal clear.
| In this unusual context, the FTC's inability to offer _any_
| indication of the metric(s) or method(s) it used to calculate
| Facebook's market share renders its vague "60%-plus" assertion
| too speculative and conclusory to go forward. Because this
| defect could conceivably be overcome by re-pleading, however,
| the Court will dismiss only the Complaint, not the case, and
| will do so without prejudice to allow Plaintiff to file an
| amended Complaint.
|
| Not sure what the FTC's game plan was going into an antitrust
| fight without a market share pitch.
| FridayoLeary wrote:
| Ouch. The judge didn't really hold back there, the guys in
| FTC must be stinging. I'm not a fan of FB but it doesn't
| sound like FTC deserved to win that case.
| aardvarkr wrote:
| Thanks for highlighting this part of the text. It's shocking
| to see how vague the complaint was and I hope they get their
| facts together because this action needs to happen. If I
| recall correctly, this antitrust lawsuit was filed
| prematurely because trump wanted to claim credit for it and
| there was quite a hullabaloo about it at the time.
| danpattn wrote:
| If the FTC did file prematurely for political reasons they
| should've known that the case didn't have a chance. I hope
| they kept working behind the scenes on a well-formed one.
| Maybe that was the original plan, rush in with a case to
| please the Trump administration then follow up with the
| actual complaint once they finish it. Then again, this may
| be wishful thinking. Incompetence is a much simpler
| explanation.
| einpoklum wrote:
| > If the FTC did file prematurely for political reasons
| they should've known that the case didn't have a chance.
|
| Perhaps they did know the case wouldn't have a chance.
| Perhaps there isn't a plan to follow up with the actual
| complaint. It's not like the federal government has
| seriously pursued anti-trust activity in recent decades.
| dathinab wrote:
| > Not sure what the FTC's game plan was going into an
| antitrust fight without a market share pitch.
|
| Maybe their plan was to lose to destabilize any later lawsuit
| which would have had a reasonable chance of winning?
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| One important thing to call out here is that even the above two
| points don't actually matter in the final dismissal.
| Ultimately, it boils down to something simple: time.
|
| The FTC had nearly a decade to bring something up and it
| didn't. This ultimately is problematic because Facebook would
| look at this and clearly see the FTC had no problems with its
| actions. So to look at Facebook's conduct in the time that has
| passed is ultimately unfair to Facebook. Since its actions
| since would have been seen as being compliant.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Pages 50-53 are actually about why the court doesn't consider
| it a valid argument against the case, including precedent
| against the argument.
| thehappypm wrote:
| If you think about Facebook the consumer platform, it has a
| high market share, but there are a lot of competitors in the
| space. Social content site competitors include TikTok, YouTube,
| and Reddit. Messaging app competitors include iMessage and even
| SMS.
|
| Facebook the business (selling ads) is a large business but the
| largest advertiser is Google, so they aren't even the leader.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| Hypothetically, Facebook has a monopoly in social networking,
| but then they decide to launch a roblox clone tomorrow. Since
| they have a new product line where they don't have a
| monopoly, we should look the other way? It's true that
| Facebook exists in many spaces where they are not dominant
| but that does not diminish their dominance - in fact it's
| their platform dominance that makes them so dangerous to
| smaller companies in other spaces.
| graeme wrote:
| You're commenting on a thread about reality, not a
| hypothetical, where the judge specifically called out
| reasoning such as yours that argues Facebook is a
| monopolist without defining terms or making concrete market
| share arguments.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > but that does not diminish their dominance - in fact it's
| their platform dominance that makes them so dangerous to
| smaller companies in other spaces.
|
| You have to demonstrate somehow that the dominance exists
| in a rigorous way.
| whoisjuan wrote:
| I honestly think that the idea that social networking is
| monopolizable is absurd.
|
| There are billions of online person to person interactions
| that happen outside of Facebook. There are hundreds of
| thousands of websites and communities that allow
| communication, discussion and sharing of user generated
| content. There are hundreds of thousands of online spaces
| that provide an outlet to augment a message.
|
| So if anything, regulators should start by redefining
| what's a monopoly because the current definition clearly
| doesn't fit the classic narrative around monopolies.
| TheAdamAndChe wrote:
| Thinking of Facebook merely as a consumer platform seems
| overly broad to me. Each of those are social networks, but
| they fill a particular niche in the social experience.
| YouTube is for asynchronous videos from people you generally
| don't directly know, Reddit is for pseudoanonymous
| communities, etc.
|
| Facebook's niche is in one-to-many communication with people
| you directly know. It's also arguably one of the stickiest
| forms of social network because of the strength of its
| network effects. There is very little real competition in
| that niche.
| nindalf wrote:
| Hacker News is a monopoly in the social-news-aggregator-
| with-a-tech-focus-along-with-other-interesting-content-and-
| strong-moderation-space. dang better watch out for the FTC.
| scotuswroteus wrote:
| -and-an-emphasis-on-downvoting-me
| dageshi wrote:
| If you keep narrowing the focus down, every product becomes
| a monopoly on its functionality?
| crazygringo wrote:
| Finding niches is how competition _happens_. Another term
| for it is market differentiation. Even if two products
| /companies start out identically, they quickly diverge
| somewhat.
|
| Pepsi doesn't copy Coca-Cola's marketing about being a
| sexy/mainstream drink, they create their own niche of being
| for younger independent personalities.
|
| When people choose to get their viral news from Reddit
| rather than Facebook, or their viral videos from YouTube
| rather than Facebook, that's competition period.
| TheAdamAndChe wrote:
| The difference between Coke and Pepsi is marketing and
| flavor, but they directly compete in the same market. The
| products they have are virtually the same, only minor
| differences.
|
| The product differences between, say, Facebook and
| YouTube are night and day. You wouldn't add an
| acquaintance on YouTube and start messaging them through
| that platform. I'm not sure you can even message people
| like that on it anymore. But you can on Facebook. They're
| fundamentally different products, they only align because
| they both have some sort of social aspect to them. Kind
| of.
| kube-system wrote:
| This is a matter of perspective. Being intimately
| familiar with the differences between YouTube and
| Facebook, you can point out many differences. I'm sure if
| you were a food scientist or food marketing exec you
| could point out many difference between different soft
| drinks. These differences are market differentiators, not
| evidence of being in an entirely different market.
| Outside of the tech sphere, people see social media as a
| monolith in the same way that you see the soft drink
| industry.
| crazygringo wrote:
| I'd look at it a different way: "Facebook" and "YouTube"
| aren't single products, but rather each one is a
| collection of something like 10-20 products that live on
| a single platform.
|
| For "viral videos", Facebook and YouTube (and Reddit)
| _absolutely_ directly compete in the same market.
|
| For "educational videos", YouTube competes with other
| platforms.
|
| While for "tracking social acquaintances" Facebook
| competes with the Contacts apps by Apple and Google, as
| well as other messaging apps.
|
| Really there's no such product category as a "Facebook"
| or a "YouTube". And Facebook's original product category
| -- to keep track of social contacts and post public and
| private social messages -- is now only a tiny part of
| Facebook.
| jjk166 wrote:
| Facebook and YouTube are both in the market for users to
| show advertising to, and generally every minute spent on
| one is a minute explicitly not spent on the other. If
| facebook were selling communication with friends, then
| YouTube would not be a competitor, but that's not
| Facebook's business, nor would anyone argue that Facebook
| has a monopoly on talking to your friends.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| You can define any company as a monopoly if you dig deep
| down enough through market segments and features.
| cycomanic wrote:
| That argument goes the other way as well, you can
| construct every company as being not a monopoly by
| painting the market segment broad enough.
|
| I don't think this is a valid argument.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| At least in the cases of Standard Oil and Bell, you would
| have needed to define the markets as energy and
| communication (including the post office) for them to not
| have had near total control.
|
| You could state the generalized product they sold and
| their total control was evident.
| nightpool wrote:
| How is "communication" not potentially as broad as
| "Social media platform"? Basically every form of digital
| communication falls under the banner of social media
| platform these days. (The GP comment cites Reddit,
| YouTube and SMS--as diverse a set of websites from
| Facebook (while still being communication-focused) as I
| could imagine)
| Retric wrote:
| Saying Facebook and YouTube are direct completion seems like
| a huge stretch. Google made G+ specifically because as Far as
| Google was concerned it lacked a direct Facebook competitor.
|
| In what way can consumers substitute normal use like sharing
| photos with family members on Facebook with YouTube?
| kube-system wrote:
| As a literal answer to your question, here's how to post
| photos on YouTube:
| https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/7124474
|
| But if I understand correctly, determining whether two
| companies are competitors is more about their markets,
| rather than their feature sets.
|
| From the ruling text:
|
| > Although the precise definition of a "Personal Social
| Networking Service" is disputed (as that is the market in
| which Facebook has its alleged monopoly), it can be
| summarized here as one that enables users to virtually
| connect with others in their network and to digitally share
| their views and experiences by posting about them in a
| shared, virtual social space.
|
| YouTube would fit that definition.
| [deleted]
| Retric wrote:
| That's not even vaguely the same thing.
|
| Still if in your opinion YouTube was a "Personal Social
| Networking Service" then why do you think Google have
| made G+?
| kube-system wrote:
| It's not my opinion, it's what the court said in
| plaintext. YouTube undeniably: "enables users to
| virtually connect with others in their network and to
| digitally share their views and experiences by posting
| about them in a shared, virtual social space."
|
| Competing on features != competing in a different market.
| Feature sets and markets are two very different things.
|
| What definition would you use to define Facebook's
| market?
| Retric wrote:
| Features define the market.
|
| Spray paint manufacturers aren't in pen market even if
| you can "recorded text and images in a durable fashion
| with them." Lighting a couch on fire sure produces a lot
| of lights but couch manufactures are not part of the home
| lighting market.
|
| EDIT: But let's ignore that. Sure, YouTube has roughly
| the share of social networking market as the number of
| people posting vacation photos on it. That might just add
| up to 0.0001% market share.
| kube-system wrote:
| If you define the market as [the previous definition] +
| [photos], Facebook still has significant competitors.
|
| I can't think of any definition that would only apply to
| Facebook that isn't so narrow as to be unprecedented as a
| definition of an entire market.
|
| Bell was "telephone service". Standard oil was "oil".
| What's a comparable definition for the market that
| Facebook is in?
| jshen wrote:
| By that vague definition, any app/site with UGC is a
| personal social network which is not a very useful
| definition.
| root_axis wrote:
| They are absolutely in competition, Facebook video content
| is _massive_ and there is a ton of video content accessible
| only via Facebook. If there is any doubt, jump on Facebook
| and start scrolling through their video section.
| Retric wrote:
| Microsoft and Nintendo are in competition, that doesn't
| mean Nintendo in in the office productivity market.
| root_axis wrote:
| They are both in the video game console market though...
| brundolf wrote:
| Of all the big tech, Facebook seems like the _least_
| monopolistic to me. They have a totally different set of
| issues (ones that we may not have laws to deal with yet),
| mainly around having disproportionate power over society and
| the psyches of individual citizens. But "monopolist" feels
| like a pretty weak case.
| xxpor wrote:
| Everyone's trying to shoehorn tech into existing frameworks
| because they know passing new laws is too hard. As the
| judge pointed out though, you can't just make shit up and
| expect to get away with it.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Facebook the ad business is the monopoly.
|
| What really needs to happen is to amend monopoly definitions
| _in cases where a captive market is present._
|
| The issue with Facebook isn't that they own 100% of the ad
| market, but that they control 100% of the _Facebook_ ad
| market, which is itself large enough to constitute monopoly
| concerns. (As with Apple and Google app stores)
|
| Advertising is trickier than apps in terms of separation, but
| my gut says things would be better if companies _with large
| captive market share_ were required to wholesale ad space and
| targeting via standardized mechanisms.
|
| And were _specifically prohibited_ from developing any kind
| of value add ad products on top of their platforms.
|
| Just too much conflict of interest.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _isn 't that they own 100% of the ad market, but that
| they control 100% of the Facebook ad market_
|
| You need to define these terms in a way that doesn't make
| everything a monopoly. Because by this logic, my corner
| flower vendor has a monopoly on her corner and also on the
| flowers she is holding in her hand right now.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| Submarkets over a certain size, controlled by a single
| party
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Submarkets over a certain size_
|
| This moves the problem of defining a market to defining a
| submarket.
|
| Please don't interpret this as my being facetious. In the
| days of good and services being sold to consumers, we had
| metrics to measure this. The government measured and the
| courts incorporated said metrics into antitrust law.
| Those measures don't work well in the digital era. These
| cases are about proposing new measures and getting them
| to stick.
|
| Mind bogglingly, the FTC didn't propose such a metric.
| That's why its complaint was dismissed. I'm curious to
| see what they propose, if anything.
| twoodfin wrote:
| Like the "submarket" of Costco & Costco's shelves?
| MattGaiser wrote:
| The submarket of Walmart shelves? This would basically
| ban any business that sells goods/services from going
| beyond a certain size.
| [deleted]
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| Traditional notions of market share were companies selling
| commodities (oil, rail travel) with undifferentiated
| products.
|
| Now everything is extremely differentiated so it's hard to
| find _any_ products that are clearly competing apples to
| apples. The markets of these things overlap funnily such I
| almost wonder if the graph of "quasi-competing" products is
| fully connected.
|
| -----
|
| The institutional power of these firms isn't just in the
| things they sell. It is also in people's dependence on the
| non-fungible free services, etc.
|
| We do need new laws so issues with the courts in some sense
| are good to force the issue.
| lwhi wrote:
| Surely these companies are advertising platforms selling
| attention?
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| I dislike/hate facebook. I have no idea why anyone thinks they
| have a monopoly. I use social services just fine without FB
| services
| laurent92 wrote:
| If the lawsuit were in Brazil, it would be clear: It is
| impossible to access a majority of services without Whatsapp.
| Most phone numbers / chat services have no alternative except
| through Whatsapp, even in the administration.
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| What kind of "majority of services"?
| bogwog wrote:
| I haven't read any of the court documents, and even if I did I
| probably wouldn't understand most of it because I'm not a
| lawyer.
|
| But... Facebook has engaged in anti-competitive practices in
| the past and continues to do so today. I agree that just
| calling them a "monopoly" isn't very helpful, because they're a
| big company involved in many different markets.
|
| Most people hate Facebook nowadays, but their anti-competitive
| behavior is not one of the top 3 reasons (probably).
|
| I think if people focus on this single question: "Is <company>
| immune to competitive forces in <market>?", then the question
| of should we regulate/how should we regulate/etc becomes much
| easier to answer.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Unfortunate, but per nthe article it looks like the FTC dropped
| the ball by not providing enough specificity in it's claims and
| assuming the court would agree that Facebook is a monopoly prima
| facie.
| Dracophoenix wrote:
| Because they can't without shooting themselves in the foot. If
| the FTC defined a monopoly as widely as Ms.Khan did in her Yale
| Law Review paper, they'd alienate the entirety of the F500 and
| create a constitutional minefield. It might be litigated for a
| few years but ultimately the charge of being an illegal
| monopoly, along with any argument built on that charge, would
| ultimately be dismissed. What they probably wanted was to send
| in to most general and inoffensive charges first and amend
| their claims as needed.
| AcerbicZero wrote:
| It's almost amusing how effective "our" government can be at
| pushing certain things through "their" courts, while at the same
| time being almost comically ineffective in other areas. Same
| government, same courts, different outcomes.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| The court says that the FTC didn't factually establish that
| Facebook has sufficient market power to qualify as a monopoly (as
| I understand it).
|
| In a certain market, Facebook + Instagram have great market
| power, but it depends on how you define the market. I'm curious
| if anyone has done it, maybe financial analysts, and how they
| define it:
|
| * If the market includes public messaging, such as Twitter, then
| Facebook's power is relatively much diminished.
|
| * If the market includes public forums, such as Reddit, HN, and
| every phpBB board, then it's hard to say Facebook controls
| monopoly power.
|
| * LinkedIn provides similar service to professionals
|
| * Where does Pinterest fit? TikTok?
|
| Part of the problem is that Facebook competes in all these
| markets. In which one(s) do they have a monopoly and how are they
| defined? 'Personal user page + social communication'?
| jdgoesmarching wrote:
| This whole conversation becomes a lot easier if we realize that
| two things can be true:
|
| 1. Facebook has an uncomfortable level of power in advertising,
| eyeballs on screens, and proprietary data
|
| 2. Legals definitions that were created over 100 years ago
| mostly focused on price gouging are not going to address this
| neatly
| LanceH wrote:
| The whole conversation is a lot easier if you just define
| Facebook as a monopoly.
|
| #1 is assuming the argument, really. #2 is stating that old
| law doesn't work and implying we need new law to let us do
| what we want...again, assuming there is a problem, making no
| attempt to determine whether there is a legal problem
| blsapologist42 wrote:
| It's not the job of the judiciary or the FTC to create new
| laws. If Facebook is not violating current laws there's
| nothing for them to do, it would require new legislation.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| No, the court says the FTC didn't _allege_ that Facebook has
| sufficient market power to qualify as a monopoly. Factual
| determinations come later in the process.
|
| The court dismissed the pleading document (the initial
| complaint) due to its inadequacies _but not the case itself,_
| which means that the FTC can file a new complaint with more
| detailed allegations.
|
| The rough order of civil procedure: the complaint, where the
| plaintiff(s) makes _allegations_ of fact and law about the
| defendant party (or parties). This is followed by discovery,
| where the actual fact-gathering occurs, then usually a motion
| for summary judgment adjudicated on the facts acquired during
| discovery, and finally, a trial on the merits (unless the
| parties settle first).
| gautamdivgi wrote:
| Facebook doesn't have a "market" in messaging or social
| networks. To be fair they don't sell messaging or social space.
|
| Facebook's "market" is advertising in which it isn't the
| leader.
|
| I guess it would be hard to prove a monopoly on something you
| don't even sell.
| fallingknife wrote:
| If the WhatsApp merger is in question, the FTC would have to
| define the market very broadly. I don't think there is any case
| to be made that FB has monopoly power over the messaging
| market, so I don't think they are likely to succeed.
| mdoms wrote:
| It's such a shame that in the American culture the terms "anti-
| trust" and "monopoly" have become so closely coupled.
| jjk166 wrote:
| A corporate trust is a monopoly or a near-monopoly, so it is
| neither surprising nor shameful that the term anti-trust should
| be associated with monopolies.
| mdoms wrote:
| The intent of antitrust law is to prevent anti competitive
| behaviour. This may include, but is absolutely not limited
| to, monopolistic behaviour.
| cogman10 wrote:
| Yeah, and it really is unfortunate that monopolistic
| behavior is the only place the US (lightly) goes after
| anti-competitive behavior.
|
| ISPs are another example where they should get involved but
| don't. I'd love to see the US either turn the internet into
| a public utility or trust bust the snot out of big telcoms
| like comcast and AT&T.
|
| Even now, in my local market a new fiber provider is coming
| to town, and wouldn't you know it, my ISP prices have
| dropped for the first time in years to be ever so slightly
| lower than this provider.
| theptip wrote:
| Lots of questions in this thread asking the obvious-yet-difficult
| question of "in what market / in what sense does FB have a
| monopoly?"
|
| I think Ben Thompson has the analysis right here.
|
| High-level summary: https://stratechery.com/2019/tech-and-
| antitrust/
|
| Facebook-specific analysis: https://stratechery.com/2017/why-
| facebook-shouldnt-be-allowe...
|
| With the key bit of analysis being (from the latter):
|
| > Facebook, for its part, had, for better or worse, transitioned
| to a public app that not only handled symmetric relationships,
| but, at least according to perception, asymmetric broadcast as
| well; that, though, left an opening for an app like Snapchat.
| Thus Facebook's acquisition drive: the company had already
| secured Instagram, giving it a position in asymmetric ephemeral
| broadcast apps; Snapchat rebuffed advances, so the company soon
| moved on to WhatsApp.
|
| > The importance of these two acquisitions cannot be overstated:
| Facebook has always been secure in its dominance of permanent
| social relationships, a position that has given the company a
| dominant position in digital advertising. However, while everyone
| may need a permanent place on the Internet (all of those
| teenagers people say Facebook needs to reach have Facebook
| accounts), the ultimate currency is attention, and much like real
| life, it is ephemeral conversation that dominates. Facebook, by
| virtue of early decisions around privacy and significant bad
| press about the dangers of revealing too much, was locked out of
| this sphere, so it bought in.
|
| So if we segment the markets along the lines that consumers tend
| to intuitively percieve, FB has monopoly over public symmetric
| (personal) social networking. That seems like a coherent market
| segment definition to me. Though of course that's a lot of
| qualifiers so I could easily see someone objecting that they are
| arbitrary/post-hoc.
|
| As a separate point, perhaps someone with legal expertise can
| comment on this one - I'm curious why the FTC's complaint relied
| on establishing a monopoly; the Sherman Act doesn't actually
| require establishing a monopoly; anticompetitive conduct that
| attempts to establish a harmful monopoly is also illegal (e.g.
| see https://www.justice.gov/atr/competition-and-monopoly-
| single-...). It seems obvious to me that FB's acquisitions were
| primarily intended to acquire a monopoly (if they didn't already
| have one), indeed Zuckerberg explicitly stated that he was trying
| to prevent a competitor from emerging in the emails that were in
| these court cases.
| xxpor wrote:
| >anticompetitive conduct that attempts to establish a harmful
| monopoly is also illegal
|
| I think point 3 is the relevant bit: "a dangerous probability
| of achieving monopoly power."
|
| It seems like the judge is basically saying that probability
| isn't high enough based on their market share (that the FTC
| couldn't even give a good number for).
| markus_zhang wrote:
| We should dispel the illusionthat large corporations compete
| freely with each other so monopoly requires something like 75%
| -80% of market share.
|
| In reality even a (consistent) 20% market share is pretty much
| good enough IMHO. You have a bunch of corporations, each taking
| about 20% and they will collude 100%.
| DannyBee wrote:
| You are confused. The law already recognizes collusion claims
| and they are unrelated to monopolies (as they should be)
|
| The FTC did not plead collusion here
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