Facebook leak hints at its defense against a government-ordered breakup | Hacker News Reader

Facebook leak hints at its defense against a government-ordered breakup

engadget.com

76 pointsGarbage26 comments

The press goes from calling out Facebook and zuckerberg as idiots for wildly overpaying for instragram to now saying that it was unfair they bought instagram.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/follo...

Does anyone doubt facebook has pumped some pretty massive bucks into insta? I mean, insta had 13 employees or something?

Instagram is less of an issue compared to whatsapp for the reasons you outlined, Facebook mostly took it to where it is, and it also has plenty of competition. TikTok, Twitter, Snap are all large.

Whatsapp and Messenger have significant combined marketshare and it was already much more valuable when they bought it.

Whatsapp was something like 50 employees and a 400m users when FB bought them in 2014. Plenty of people (though not not all) were baffled by the 19B price that they paid at the time (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7266618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7275470, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7272641), especially in the US where Whatsapp was/is relatively unpopular.

That's a great set of links. The hotmail comparison is apt - Microsoft basically trashed / dropped hotmail? So these acquisitions can go either way?

The risk with what's up is definitely higher. That said, Facebook has an INCREDIBLE acquisition success rate with insta and whatsup.

Facebook didn't make the WhatsApp acquisition blind. They had data from their Onavo VPN service showing exactly how popular it was compared to their own Messenger.

and it holds potentially less important data. I know many influencial people including first line politicians in my country that use whatsapp on the daily, while I really can't see any of them sharing confidential information on instagram of all places.

And yes, using a service like that is an extremely bad decision in the first place, but that's where we are right now.

I can see that - I use neither and don't have the facebook app on my phone so for me it's irrelevant but I know internationally whatsup just crushes the local telcos.

It's just the price of making a successful bet. Critics were fine with it when they were confident it would fail. They just can't stand being wrong so they're making an effort to make it true.

How does overpaying for an acquisition preclude Facebook from forming a monopoly? If anything, Facebook has more incentives to overpay because of the monopolistic powers it would have.

'The Press' is a single entity?

It's not, anyone that uses that term or "Mainstream media" can instantly be dismissed.

The hivemind behind the press is a single entity

I decided to look back at the AT&T split up and the case against Microsoft and found a news story and justice dept. write-ups:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1982/01/09/u...

https://www.justice.gov/atr/att-divestiture-was-it-necessary...

https://www.justice.gov/atr/us-v-microsoft-courts-findings-f...

Near the Washington Post article's end: "Throughout the trial, AT&T lawyers had argued that this "dismemberment" would hurt the nation's telephone network by raising prices to consumers and resulting in a deterioration of the phone system the nation depends on for defense communications and other emergency situations..."

The FTC case against Facebook seems promising to me, but it seems like the AT&T and Microsoft cases were settled before final judgments.

> Near the Washington Post article's end: "Throughout the trial, AT&T lawyers had argued that this "dismemberment" would hurt the nation's telephone network by raising prices to consumers and resulting in a deterioration of the phone system the nation depends on for defense communications and other emergency situations..."

Excuse or not, this technically is true and it is possible things like this happen.

...but! Entry cost for telephony then (=building a whole new, alternative telephone network) is so expensive, that it's unrealistic to build one, except maybe in places with such population density, that the cost of new wiring is offset by the number of new customers in a small area.

Compared to pulling new telephone cables for the whole country, making a new social network is very fast and cheap (apparently, takes 13(?) employees in case of instagram), and allows a slow-start (run the network on one $5 virtual machine, then get another, and another, then have issues with scaling and technical debt, but slowly fix stuff when money pours in), which means that even if facebook fails horribly after the breakup, 'someone new' will fill the gap.

In AT&T's case, the second link ends with the DoJ saying the FCC should've regulated better.

For Facebook, I think we wouldn't want just another giant Facebook2 to pop-up in it's place. It's important that the FTC (or Congress) stress real data portability, privacy regulations and even protocols/standards if needed to tie everything together in a post-Facebook social media. Though I have doubts about just how much of this will be accomplished.

Antitrust probe released at end of October? Sounds like government leverage against FB right before the election.

I worked at MS in the early 90's during the time when they wanted to break it up -- I'm convinced that if BillG simply accepted this and approached it in a constructive way, that separate systems and apps companies would have been fantastically good for both shareholders and the software that was produced by MS and others.

The takeover was based on lies anyway: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/IP_17_...

From the document you linked: "The Commission therefore considers that, albeit relevant, the incorrect or misleading information provided by Facebook did not have an impact on the outcome of the clearance decision."

Need to go far further than just splitting it into three parts.

Yes burying each of them too.

Then put concrete all over it.

Dont forget all the radioactive waste signs around the perimeter.

What do you have in mind?

Facebook should be shattered into a dozen pieces that are then forced to compete in the social media market.

I'm not opposed to the idea, but I wonder how small the pieces can get before they're not practical to run as a company anymore.

Obviously, things like Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp could be competing with their counterparts. As I've never really used Facebook, I don't know what the core app does and how it could be split up.

Do you have any insight there?

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