I laughed at this because I thought the same thing.
Conspiratorial or no, that line of argument won't fly. Saying everything is so integrated that it can't possibly be decentralized is basically proof of monopoly.
It would also be a hilarious argument to make after previously convincing the European Commission in 2014 that there is no technical way to integrate Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp user accounts. [0]
I think “technical” here just means something like: one uses phone numbers and the other uses emails. The current technical solution doesn’t make it straightforward to merge. Evolving the technical solution would require product and user facing changes. And probably a lot of edge cases
I am not sure why a shared messaging infrastructure implies merging accounts is easy/possible. It's fully possible to have messages pass on a common infrastructure between different entities that correspond to messenger/whatsapp accounts.
I'm not saying I necessarily believe facebook here, but I don't understand how they are contradicting themselves here.
> Saying everything is so integrated that it can't possibly be decentralized is basically proof of monopoly.
That doesn't make any sense to me. I would expect different applications from the same company to share the same underlying infrastructure. Whether or not they are a monopoly is orthogonal to the issue of integration.
At the far end of this reasoning three separate companies that all use AWS share the same underlying infrastructure and all go down when AWS does. It doesn't mean they're not independently managed.
And the same could be said for the electrical grid, the post services, roads, etc. I agree that infrastructure and monopoly are two very distict concepts.
> Saying everything is so integrated that it can't possibly be decentralized is basically proof of monopoly.
This doesn't matter from the standard of antitrust law. What most fail to grasp is that being a monopoly is not illegal. It's only illegal to use monopoly power to harm consumer welfare.
In this case integration between services is a pretty strong defense against this. Facebook can argue that consolidating the infrastructure allows them to deliver each product at a lower cost and/or higher quality than if it was served independently.
If the court accepted those facts, then Facebook would have a ironclad argument against being broken up under the consumer welfare standard.
> > Saying everything is so integrated that it can't possibly be decentralized is basically proof of monopoly.
> This doesn't matter from the standard of antitrust law. What most fail to grasp is that being a monopoly is not illegal. It's only illegal to use monopoly power to harm consumer welfare.
Citation needed? I thought, in the US at least, that the government will go after you if you use your monopoly powers to enter into other markets. For instance Google surfacing its own, other products as the top results in search.
It depends on how the Justice department feels, to some extent. GM in the 50s and 60s actually kept an eye on their market share, and sometimes would kill/cutback projects or products that may have threatened going over a certain percentage (around 60%, IIRC.) At that time merely going over that number would have been enough to start an investigation.
Some would argue though that back then DOJ 'cared' more.
The summary is that the Chicago school of Economics promoted the idea that in a competitive market, predatory pricing is not possible. Thus, when you see an industry structure emerge (e.g. duopoly), you should assume that it is an efficient competitive outcome. After this, instead of focusing on market share percentages, antitrust authorities began to focus primarily on consumer harm (which is much more challenging to show in court e.g. for predatory pricing, you cannot only argue that your competitor has very low prices right now, you also have to prove that they intend to raise prices once they achieve monopoly power).
Jurisprudence also changed on the topic since then. In particular, Robert Bork published the legal theory of consumer welfare in 1978. SCOTUS essentially adapted that wholesale into case law starting with Reiter v. Sototone.
Given the current makeup of the court, it seems extremely unlikely that the justices would overturn this precedent.
The biggest challenge for the antitrust lawyers in this case will be to outline consumer harm. In more traditional cases harm is measured in dollars. Here it will have to be measured in privacy, free speech, etc. And that’s a much harder case to make. I even wonder if it’s possible to argue that services for which you don’t pay (Fb, Insta, and Whatsapp) and that are not essential can be considered monopolistic.
Yes that was a defense. Explorer.exe and IE were intimately tied together. Remember “active desktop”? You could make your Windows desktop background a web page. Crazy times...
With Wallpaper Engine or similar programs you can still do it. It's no longer a Windows feature, but they have enough API surface to make it possible for other software to implement.
Bare in mind back then was before "Web 2.0", there wasn't AJAX, responsive web design and any of the other technologies we now take for granted. And to add to the woes, most computers still weren't powerful enough to handle running Active Desktop. It was a huge resource drain.
Some of the other desktop integration features of Internet Explorer 4 were pretty nice though.
These days most desktop environments allow for desktop widgets and usually there's a web view widget amongst them. So you can still have your web desktop if you wanted. At least now computers are powerful enough, and the frontend tools are useful enough, that there is some arguable benefit.
I don't think MS said it was bundled in the kernel, but it is true that parts of IE are tied into the OS (or at least used to be) in the form of mshtml and jscript.
Actually you could, as long as that browser used the Trident engine. Microsoft could have easily shipped a dedicated update application that's just a simple "browser" locked to the windows update website.
At that point (around the time of the acquisition), I guess one could say there was significant overlap between FB and IG users, and that FB had more users than IG.
Server side was a few python components with lots of tricks in Postgres for scaling purposes. You didn't have any real choices for what language you used in iOS
Yes, that's what I meant. The point I was trying to make was that just knowing server side scripting was a necessary but not sufficient condition to create a hit photo sharing app at that time, because there weren't many options on the camera at the time, and the filters were what drove the growth at that time.
FYI that's exactly what they did when they broke up Ma Bell into the 7 RBOC's. Same company, same massive infrastructure. They owned everything and the government was still able to break them up.
[0] https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/pl/IP_17_...