[fallingknife]

If Instagram would have disappeared on its own, Facebook would have just built it in house. They spent $1 billion on it because it was cheaper to do that than to start from scratch. And how could anti-trust possibly stop that?

[kennywinker]

That's just wrong. It doesn't cost $1 billion to copy instagram, at most it'd cost a few million. By buying them, you not only get the app/feature set - more importantly you also remove them from the market as a competitor. This is exactly what we're seeing play out with tiktok. If FB could have bought tiktok, they would have - they couldn't, so they cloned it for far less than $1bil (fb reels) - but now we have a situation of two competing services that users can compare and contrast and prefer. The market it segmented. Which is bad for facebook's shareholders, but good for users, workers, and advertisers. This is exactly why we need good anti-trust

[mrkurt]

The point of antitrust is to encourage that. That's competition. We want Facebook to build net new things.

Facebook's not all that good at building new things, though. Most big companies aren't. Partially because they don't need to be.

[scarface74]

And how would that be a better outcome for the startups?

If you haven’t noticed, Microsoft and Apple have both been around for over four decades “creating new things”.

[salawat]

They really haven't. They've been acquiring startups, digesting and rebranding said startups innovations with an in house version, and (arguably innovating) in finding ways to plaster a transaction layer into solved problems that previously lacked a recurring revenue compatible transaction framework.

In short, subsidizing themselves by abandoning one time purchasable software, and replacing it with either ad serving or subscription based versions.

[mrkurt]

I don't mind startups failing. I would prefer that startups fail. I would prefer big companies fail. It's healthy for companies to die.

Apple and Amazon are more of a vertical integration problem. They expand their market power by monopolizing the vertical supply chain.

Microsoft acquires companies to increase their market power. Skype, GitHub, LinkedIn, now Activision.

[fallingknife]

Monopolizing a vertical supply chain isn't even a concept that makes sense. The point is that with a monopoly customers have only one purchasing option. This condition does not exist when a company integrates vertically.

[mrkurt]

You're arguing the semantics of a monopoly, but you should just mentally replace the word "monopoly" with "market power".

When Apple buys components from a vendor, they have less market power. When they build their own components, they have more market power.

Both Apple and Amazon shipped their own ARM chips. This increased their market power. Because they're the only companies with access to those chips. Meanwhile, independent ARM vendors go out of business about once every 3 months because the biggest companies using ARM aren't part of their addressable market. Which means small companies have limited access to ARM CPUs.

When Amazon builds their own delivery company, they increase their market power. When they buy from Fedex and UPS, they decrease their market power. And, when they do their own deliveries, they limit competitors market power.

You can be fine with all of this. Those of us who are interested in competitive markets worry about it a lot. You don't have to be worried about competitive markets, though. It's totally valid to not think increased competition is a good thing.

There is a lot of nuance here. If you're stuck on the word monopoly, I don't think you're going to really hear the things antitrust folks have to say.

[scarface74]

> You're arguing the semantics of a monopoly,

Yes “words mean things”.

> When Apple buys components from a vendor, they have less market power. When they build their own components, they have more market power

So now you’re saying a company shouldn’t be allowed to build and design their own components? Doesn’t it help competition that Apple, Microsoft, Google, Qualcomm, and MediaTek among others are creating and modifying their own processors?

> Which means small companies have limited access to ARM CPUs.

Any company can buy an ARM processor from Qualcomm and MediaTek. Have you looked at all of the phone manufacturers who sell in China and India and even the US?

> Those of us who are interested in competitive markets worry about it a lot. You don't have to be worried about competitive markets, though. It's totally valid to not think increased competition is a good thing.

Every market you mentioned has a competitor that third parties can go to - ARM chips, delivery companies etc.

[fallingknife]

Vertical integration doesn't decrease competition, it increases it. If there are N companies in a market, and a company that purchases from one decides to vertically integrate.and enter the market, now there are N+1.

[scarface74]

Yes because Skype and GitHub are market leaders and it’s really hard to change your git origin.

How is Apple “monopolizing the vertical supply chain” while having only 13% of the global cell phone market?

[shagie]

One could argue that they are purchasing companies to incorporate them into the company's product directly rather than relying on a 3rd party vendor to supply it.

Two examples: AuthenTech and Kiva

https://www.fromscratchradio.org/show/scott-moody

https://www.fromscratchradio.org/show/mick-mountz

The argument (I believe) is for leaving those companies as stand alone and having Apple and Amazon rely upon them not going bankrupt or getting purchased by some other competitor and disrupting their own company.

You've seen that happen before - BigCo is using a 3rd party vendor, someone buys it and then turns around and starts charging BigCo lots of money.

To prevent that from happening, BigCo should have bought the company when it started using it (if possible) to prevent that disruption in its systems, products, or services.

[scarface74]

And because Apple bought Authentec, it cornered the market on fingerprint base authentication…oh wait.

[wizzwizz4]

> Yes because Skype and GitHub are market leaders and it’s really hard to change your git origin.

Yes, for exactly those reasons. Have you actually tried getting everyone on a team to change their git origin? And that's before mentioning the other stuff you have to migrate: the issue tracker, the CI pipeline…

[scarface74]

Yes,

You tell everyone to change the git set-origin.

Hardly anyone uses GitHub’s rudimentary issue tracker and reconfiguring a CI/CD pipeline is child’s play unless you use GitHub actions and very few if any large companies use GitHub actions.

[mrkurt]

Ok, well, we're not talking about the same stuff here so I'm not sure it's worth going back and forth. We can just continue to be on different sides of the antitrust issue/