[ivirshup]

How so?

Facebook buying Instagram and WhatsApp is essentially them buying out their competition.

Google running a cloud service is more like renting out excess capacity – which is quite common across industries. Plus there's a lot of competition in the cloud space.

[inetknght]

> Google running a cloud service is more like renting out excess capacity

If that were actually the case, then sure.

But it's not. Alphabet's Google Cloud services have whole data centers dedicated to renting to the public and Alphabet's Google and other businesses entities are their own customer.

[oblio]

There's a clear conflict of interest when owning the platform and services on top of it.

You'll be <<very>> tempted to do things to the platform to favor your own services.

The incentives are so strong I don't think we've even invented things to prevent this on a long enough time scale.

[sam0x17]

Yeah, a charitable reading of the old trust-busting laws and the motivations behind them would suggest that something like a search engine company should not have any products other than the search engine itself, lest there be a massive conflict of interest. If you have an interest in receiving incoming web traffic, you have a conflict of interest if you also own a search engine (or online advertising network, for that matter).