The Feds Versus Facebook
Rob Price, writing for Business Insider earlier this year:
In an email to Facebook's chief financial officer at the time, Zuckerberg said Facebook wanted to buy Instagram to give itself more time to fend off competitors.
"One way of looking at this is that what we're really buying is time. Even if some new competitors springs up, buying Instagram, Path, Foursquare, etc now will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get close to their scale again," he wrote. "Within that time, if we incorporate the social mechanics they were using, those new products won't get much traction since we'll already have their mechanics deployed at scale."
Isobel Asher Hamilton, Katie Canales, and Paige Leskin, reporting for Business Insider last week:
The lawsuits allege that Facebook used a strategy of neutralizing competitors before they could threaten the company's dominance of the social-media market. The suits call out Facebook's decisions to buy rather than compete with Instagram and WhatsApp, and they allege it imposed "anticompetitive conditions" on software developers.
Both complaints seek a "divestiture of assets" for Facebook — that is, breaking off Instagram and WhatsApp from the social-media giant. Additionally, Facebook could be required to get approval from the government before any mergers or acquisitions in the future.
[…]
The coalition of attorneys general, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, began an investigation into Facebook in September 2019, and the FTC subsequently joined. Attorneys general from 46 states as well as Washington, DC, and Guam have signed on to the lawsuit. The only states whose attorneys general have not signed on are Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and South Dakota.
Forty six states. That’s more than enough to pass a constitutional amendment. Facebook is about to get fucked up.
This investigation (and any resulting regulation) is clearly focusing on antitrust issues, but I sincerely hope that congressional leaders take a long hard look at Facebook’s privacy practices while they’ve got them under the microscope.
I hope Facebook gets what they deserve for capitalizing on the destruction of privacy and the polarization of the American people.