[unreal37]

The government is claiming that Facebook bought Meta and Whatsapp because it couldn't compete with them.

Is that illegal? I don't understand! Every company that buys another company buys it because it adds something to their business. It's a ridiculous claim.

[Retric]

It’s an argument for how to break up the company not just a complaint about what happened. Companies that buy a supplier or customer frequently didn’t compete with that supplier so breaking them off wouldn’t break up the monopoly.

Whatsapp was purchased as a competition and therefore there’s a solid case for spitting the company along that line. Split off Instagram and things look even more competitive.

[bakugo]

> Every company that buys another company buys it because it adds something to their business.

The point is that they didn't acquire those companies to add to their business, they acquired them because their continued independent existence detracted from their business. Also known as competition.

[cloverich]

What are you basing that on? Instagram is clearly their preferred app at least in the US. It definitely bolstered their business. And they obviously invested heavily into it post acquisition.

I dislike meta but wouldnt call their ownership of instagram anti competitive monopolistic.

[miltonlost]

Yes, trying to beat your competition by buying them is incredibly illegal and should be illegal. If you have 70% of a market and an up-and-comer is now at 25% but growing, a market leader purchasing their competitor to maintain their market position is an anti-competitive move and why we don't and shouldn't allow every single horizontal or vertical or conglomerate merger.

>it because it adds something to their business. It's a ridiculous claim.

"It" and "Something" are incredibly vague and meaningless. Their vacuousness is what allows you to not understand the illegal behavior.

[jasode]

>, trying to beat your competition by buying them is incredibly illegal

If you weren't aware, it's actually legal to buy a competitor. It just has to pass antitrust review.

E.g. In 2006, the government approved Google acquisition of Youtube which competed with Google Video: https://www.google.com/search?q=google+2006+acquisition+yout...

Companies buy/merge competitors all the time that passes FTC legal review. E.g. Boeing acquired competitor McDonnell Douglas. Hewlett-Packard acquired Compaq Computer.

And sometimes US government encourages mergers. E.g. US asks stronger bank buy a weaker competitor bank. It's been leaked that the US Govt is encouraging competitors Intel and AMD to merge ... so the USA semiconductor industry can be stronger and thus, less dependent on Taiwan TSMC and stay ahead of China.

https://www.google.com/search?q=us+government+encouraging+in...

[AnthonyMouse]

> Companies buy/merge competitors all the time that passes FTC legal review. E.g. Boeing acquired competitor McDonnell Douglas. Hewlett-Packard acquired Compaq Computer.

These are mergers that were allowed, but probably shouldn't have been because their industries were already quite consolidated by that point.

The ones that should be okay is when e.g. a company with 4% market share wants to buy a company with 0.5% market share. Companies merging when they each already have double digit percentages of the market is craziness.

> It's been leaked that the US Govt is encouraging competitors Intel and AMD to merge ... so the USA semiconductor industry can be stronger and thus, less dependent on Taiwan TSMC and stay ahead of China.

This sort of thinking is a demonstration of incompetence. AMD and Intel can both design competitive processors. AMD sold their fabs and now has the processors made by TSMC. Intel still makes them but their manufacturing process has fallen behind, to the point that they too have used TSMC to make some of their products. Saddling AMD with Intel's uncompetitive process would only put them both at a disadvantage against other competitors using TSMC.

The real problem here is that Intel was too vertically integrated and focused on producing only its own designs on its fabs, and then abandoned the low end of the market to sustain its margins. Which allowed TSMC to capture enough market share that the larger volume gave them enough capital to take the lead.

What the US needs is not mergers but the opposite -- its own TSMC as a competitive contract fab that can do the volumes needed to sustain a state of the art process.

[pengaru]

> The government is claiming that Facebook bought Meta and Whatsapp because it couldn't compete with them.

s/Meta/Instagram/