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I'm highly annoyed by the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) charges against Facebook. In fact, I'm outraged. Maybe I should make a Blunders episode about this issue!?
The FTC has declared that Facebook is an "illegal monopoly", and said it should be broken up. In particular, the lawsuit calls for the unwinding of the company's Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions, which were completed in 2012 and 2014 respectively. Both deals passed antitrust muster back then, so what now?
Facebooks lawyer said: "The Instagram you see today is the Instagram that Facebook built, not the app it acquired. When Facebook bought Instagram, it had about 2% of the users it has today, just 13 employees, no revenue and virtually no infrastructure of its own." Meanwhile, WhatsApp has grown to having over a billion users who depend on it for communication with friends and family.
Facebook also notes that while the products are distinct to users, they share back-end resources for infrastructure (computer servers and networking), advertising, operations and more. Of course, that was Mark Zuckerberg's plan all along. And why not?
Regulators now say that privacy is a competition concern. They moan that Facebook snoops on its users and that its monopolistic practices have reduced the "quality and variety of privacy options and content" available to the public. Rubbish! The whole point is that these services keep us in touch with our pals online. Life was worse before they came along.
Facebook is free to use, as are Instagram and WhatsApp. The surveillance is used to customise ads, that is all. Trust me, our lives are not that interesting. If you are a conspiracy theorist, get off the network, make yourself some tea and wear a tinfoil hat.
Facebook has plenty of competitors - sites like Snapchat and TikTok have many hundreds of millions of users.
Anyway, antitrust lawsuits take years. The one against Microsoft 20 years ago was a complete flop. Facebook thinks it has a strong case and is likely to fight hard. Politicians come and go, as do FTC commissioners. I'm a Facebook shareholder, and I know which side of this fight I come down on.
