[rydre]

Price in this case is calculated by the amount of Ads you have to see, the effect on mental health because of Facebook's physiological experiments on its users, Facebook not obeying laws of smaller countries where it operates in, Facebook not paying taxes in other countries, owning Instagram - effectively the second largest competitor to Facebook is also owned by Facebook, too late to take anti discriminately actions for ads (if they were smaller and feared a boycott, they would take earlier precautions) etc.

We need to look beyond the "Price = 0" narrative when we're investigating things that in this new era are free.

[YarickR2]

Instagram is a Facebook competitor ? That's a sick joke; those two social networks have less in common than birds and mammals

[beagle3]

A competitor is not defined by doing the same thing (for which you can always find a distinction), but by competing for the same customer resources.

Facebook used to only have text, and people linked to pictures on (mostly) Flickr. And then MZ realized 80% of Facebook posts Link to pictures on outside websites. That’s competition for ad placement; so FB added picture storage, albums, etc. same with Videos.

The customers, advertisers, previously had Flickr as an option. Now they don’t. That’s not a coincidence. And that’s not even illegal on FB’s part as long as they aren’t a monopoly - but now they are.

[alexmingoia]

The Yale paper wants it both ways. If any app with friends/follows is a competitor then there’s plenty of competitors and the acquisition didn’t substantially reduce competition. Yet if only products similar to Facebook are considered competitors then they’ve never acquired a competitor.