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I can't understand the whole merits of this case but for some reason it seems like regulators have been overzealous on some issues while ignoring other more worthy causes.

The FB case in US seems a bit stupid as what exactly do they have a monopoly on. They don't own a paltform as such. An upcomer like Tiktok can upstage them and create its own space out of nowhere in a couple of years.

While look at Apple. They have more than 50% share of mobile devices in US and their devices are actual platforms. They own it from bare silicon to device to OS to apps to services to accessories. Their own products get first class support while others can't integrate as well. Their web browser has no real competition on mobile, so mobile web for more than 50% of users is at their mercy. They get unfair advantage for their music streaming services etc. The list is quite long.

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It's realpolitik. By the numbers Apple is worse, but Facebook has more influence over the political discourse, so they get more government pressure. The point of the pressure isn't to make them do something good (e.g. federate, or divest Instagram and WhatsApp and stop buying competitors), even though it could be.

The real point is to demonstrate the ability to penalize them. Then if they do what the government wants, i.e. censor the people the government wants censored, their problems will go away. A slap on the wrist instead of a breakup.

I also get the impression that the public perception of the brand matters a lot. The public image of Facebook has been repeatedly tarnished in the last 5-7 years. The general public sentiment seems to be best summer up by "fuck Facebook".

Apple on the other hand is generally well-liked. Even though, like you said, they engage in a lot of anti-competitive practices. By all accounts, Apple is a key player in making computing platforms more locked down and tightly controlled, fighting against the right to repair, using weird proprietary screws everywhere. Things that should make everyone on Hacker News frown... But no, Apple products are expensive status symbols, the Prada of computing, and Steve Jobs was the messiah of the modern computer age, even though he routinely threw fits and treated everyone like shit. Apple can do no wrong.

Be careful not to mix up what this echo chamber (and the rest of tech social media) feels about FB vs. what the "general public" feels about FB.

“Americans say, 76% to 11%, that Facebook makes society worse, not better, according to the survey.” https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/10/business/cnn-poll-facebook/in...

> “Americans [that answer surveys] say, 76% to 11%, that..."

There, fixed that for you.

I don't recall the last time I answered a survey.

I have better things to do, like hanging around here.

Thankfully surveys are generally backed up by statistics and not anecdotes.

Sure, but how do you reconcile a survey which measures people's feelings with their most recent quarterly earnings report which measures people's actions? [1] "Sure, I hate FB but I still want to know what my friends are up to"?

> Facebook daily active users (DAUs) – DAUs were 1.93 billion on average for September 2021, an increase of 6% year-over-year.

> Facebook monthly active users (MAUs) – MAUs were 2.91 billion as of September 30, 2021, an increase of 6% year-over-year.

> Family daily active people (DAP) – DAP was 2.81 billion on average for September 2021, an increase of 11% year-over-year.

> Family monthly active people (MAP) – MAP was 3.58 billion as of September 30, 2021, an increase of 12% year-over-year.

[1] https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...

For one thing, the survey and the earnings report are measuring different people.

The survey measured Americans (who have mostly had the longest exposure to Facebook from a global perspective), the reports (presumably) measure globally, including communities that haven't had Facebook as a pervasive part of their social discourse for the last decade+.

That's true. But digging a bit deeper, you can find DAU in US/Canada as broken out by the most recent FB earnings report slides [1]

The punchline for DAU/MAU seems to be that it has ~flatlined in US/Canada since 2019. But certainly not the drop that would be implied by commentary here and elsewhere in the tech echo chamber.

My original reply was intended as a general warning about not assuming that your worldview is the same as everyone else's worldview.

[1] https://s21.q4cdn.com/399680738/files/doc_financials/2021/q3...

Same way I reconcile 25 years of Gallup surveys showing that 75% of smokers want to quit [1]. Investors love exploiting addicts.

[1] https://news.gallup.com/poll/163763/smokers-quit-tried-multi...

>“Americans say, 76% to 11%,

What does this mean? That they really don't know what the percentages are? There's a really big chasm of those numbers. Maybe I should have taken more statistics classes, but this makes no sense to me

The remaining % are likely "no answer".

I think that means 76% think FB makes society worse, 11% think FB makes it better, the rest have no opinion or are neutral. The 11% could also include be inclusive of the neutrals, i.e. FB doesn't make society worse.

It means 76% think FB is bad, 11% don’t and 13% are indifferent

I see the issue. I was reading it as a range vs a score.

Thanx but I'll take Prada for computing over echo chamber media for sectarian violence, propaganda and ad spam.

>divest Instagram and WhatsApp and stop buying competitors

I actually thought that was the point of antitrust action. The thing that FB monopolizes is the social graph, in any incarnation. (It is a remarkable innovation, to realize that this is a defensible moat; I personally would not have guessed that. But yes, it's a politically meaningful position and so will inevitably be either attacked or (worse) coopted by government)

Not everything is a monolith. There exist people who want to actually do something about their market power, as there exist people who want to actually do something about Apple's. The people doing it to pressure them will use the same arguments, because the arguments are good.

But if Facebook is sufficiently compliant, the lack of meaningful consequences will increase in probability.

None of this is perfectly immutable. If the public wanted Facebook broken up really bad, it might happen. But there's a strong chance it goes the same way as Microsoft, i.e. people want something done, so there is a case filed against them, people assume something is being done, and then years later they settle the case without addressing anything and the company is now ten times bigger than they were when they were already too big.

It's not that public pressure doesn't matter, it's that there isn't currently enough of it to make change. Especially when the targets control the discourse.

Who wants to make odds that social media algorithms are deprioritizing criticism or critics of social media market power?

Is there any data which shows Facebook is not compliant?

If anything Apple is definitely more non compliant and has publicly opposed FBI requests for data even in cases with poor optics and pushed publicly more for e2e encryption and user privacy over law enforcement needs.

> Is there any data which shows Facebook is not compliant?

Maybe they are. The case is the Sword of Damocles. If they're compliant, it hangs over them to keep them that way, to be settled for a nominal fee some years from now. You'll know non-compliance if the sword comes down and chops off their arms and legs.

> If anything Apple is definitely more non compliant and has publicly opposed FBI requests for data even in cases with poor optics and pushed publicly more for e2e encryption and user privacy over law enforcement needs.

That's a different fight. Unelected officials trying to score PR points in favor of increased spying powers, as opposed to elected officials who have different means and goals.

It is anti-trust suit to divest Instagram/WhatsApp by the DoJ, other actions against them are also by agencies/ officials who are not elected either . Same DoJ does not pursue any monopoly action against Apple, even when customers its hurts consumers pockets directly like with the App Store 30% cut.

I do not see any difference between types of agencies and actions for either company.

Apple makes distinct public steps towards making life harder for the government and do not invite retribution/reaction from the government. Facebook does not publicly do much to oppose government policy and they need a sword hanging over them ?

To me this does not hold water.

Yeah, I still don't understand how Microsoft lost the suit back in the day just for including IE as a default web browser in windows, whereas apple can ban all web browsers but their own and it's fine.

What do you mean? I use Chrome on my iPhone just fine?

You are using Safari (actually webkit) with a Chrome UI.

Other web browsers are essentially just reskinning WebKit, which they have to use. So other browsers are allowed but everyone needs to use Apple's engine.

Actually this was an option back in the IE days too. Just nobody did it because it was stupid.

Maxthon browser used to use IE engine. It was done because Firefox engine was hard to separate from the browser (still the case today) and WebKit wasn't ready for use at least until 2005 (when it was open sourced).

And this is probably the only thing holding back Chrome's (or rather Chromium's) overwhelming dominance of the web.

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/350671/does-safari...

Windows had 95% market share. Apple has barely 50. It's a big difference

Yeah, but you could also download separate browser engines without hacking your Windows device. "Big difference" indeed.

you can do that on android if you want. which has 50% of the market share

Antitrust's metrics aren't based entirely on marketshare.

Mostly is.

I wouldn't even go that far. It's using what marketshare you have in an anticompetitive way, particularly leveraging across domains anticompetitively.

90% marketshare that you don't utilize anticompetitively? Sounds great. 50% marketshare that you utilize anticompetitively particularly across other domains? That's an antitrust issue.

You could also use MacOS Tiger if you wanted an OS that didn't ship with Internet Explorer installed. Problem solved guys!

apple doesn't have an overwhelming market position. just because you don't like it doesn't mean they have to change

> Windows had 95% market share. Apple has barely 50. It's a big difference

It's not. 50% market share is more than enough to have significant market power. Especially when the rest of the market is only a single company and barriers to entry are enormous. (Remember that Microsoft -- the company with 95% desktop market share -- tried and failed to enter this market.)

Tried is a generous word for Microsoft’s effort. They barely invested anything into their devices and retail experience, and then pulled the plug as soon as they had a decent version of their mobile OS.

If they had any chutzpah, they would have continued plowing their billions in profit into improving their device, and coming out with innovations similar to Apple’s own chips.

Obviously, Microsoft’s C suite does not think their org can do better than collect the rent from Excel licenses and Azure.

Microsoft did spend billions of dollars trying make Windows Phone work. It comes down to chicken and egg.

Users don't want a phone with no apps, developers don't make apps for a phone with no users.

In some kind of theoretical sense it should be possible to overcome this with enough money. They could have given away a hundred million phones for nothing while making cash payments to app developers. It's an open question whether this would have cost them tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars.

What is not in question is that it is a crazy huge amount of money that maybe a half dozen companies in the world even have to throw around like that, one of them was Microsoft, and two of the others are Apple and Google. Apparently no one else is even interested in making the attempt.

50% is plenty enough for serious considerations of anti-trust actions. If our system worked Windows never would have reached 95% in the first place.

There's also a significant question about what you do with that control when you have it.

One big difference (though I don't know how much it was considered in the court case) is that IE pushed ActiveX controls as the best way to get interactive content on websites, and ActiveX controls were in practice a way to run Windows-specific x86 code.

For all their faults, Google and Apple haven't tried anything equivalent to that.

> For all their faults, Google and Apple haven't tried anything equivalent to that.

Google's repeatedly pushed Chrome-specific web “features” as the new way to do everything web. Sometimes they're also implemented in Firefox. Not equivalent, but similar.

Right, Google's misbehaviour is that they're trying to gain de facto control of the "web platform", while Microsoft's was that they were trying to prevent the "web platform" coming into existence as a competitor to Windows.

I think what Microsoft was doing was objectionable in itself.

I think what Google is doing is objectionable to the extent that they try to use that control to prevent people doing things they dislike (eg, their recent work to undermine ad-blockers).

> while Microsoft's was that they were trying to prevent the "web platform" coming into existence as a competitor to Windows.

Chrome only runs on Windows, some Linuxs, and some BSDs. It includes DRM that only works on some processors… It looks like Google is trying to prevent the "web platform" from continuing to exist as a competitor to Chrome, and I don't see how that's any different.

Chrome runs on OSX too.

macOS is a BSD. It would've been redundant to list it separately. :-)

Eh, osx is its own thing at this point. The parts that really matter for a browser (UI/media, sandboxing, flipping page permissions from write to exec) are all osx specific.

“Linux” isn't one target, either. You have X11, Wayland, PulseAudio, JACK, Pipewire… That's just the more common userland windowing and audio APIs. (Yes, most of them have compatibility modes for others, but they don't quite work as well as not using the compatibility modes.)

They literally just rebranded FLoC as Topics.

Microsoft eventually won on appeal and the government settled rather than try to salvage the case.

Microsoft didn't lose any lawsuit in the US for for tying its web browser to Windows; the prosecution realized how shaky the argumentation for that'd been and subsequently dropped that claim.

That's some revisionist history. You can familiarise yourself with the case here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

From your own link: "At the appellate level, the U.S. government dropped the claim of tying given that—as laid out in Section 1 of the Sherman Act—it would have had to prove that more harm than good resulted from the instance of tying carried out by Microsoft.".

Non-rhetorical question: did the change in the ruling party in the US (in early 2001) come between the original case and the dropping of the claim?

I'm wondering whether the cause was more "a new head of the relevant department had a different attitude towards antitrust enforcement" (or possibly even "a different attitude towards Microsoft") than "the prosecution realized how shaky the argumentation had been".

From my vague memories of the time, you are correct (or at least that's how I parsed it back then).

The EU decision actually had more teeth though.

It seems a fairly accurate summary. DoJ was unlikely to win the appeal, so they settled.

As a side not, that Wikipedia article is far from neutral: > … Microsoft responded that the company would offer manufacturers a choice: one version of Windows that was obsolete, or another that did not work properly.

The GP claimed "Microsoft didn't lose any lawsuit in the US for for tying its web browser to Windows". This is absolutely false. From the Wikipedia link,

> Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson issued his findings of fact on November 5, 1999, which stated that Microsoft's dominance of the x86-based personal computer operating systems market constituted a monopoly, and that Microsoft had taken actions to crush threats to that monopoly, including Apple, Java, Netscape, Lotus Software, RealNetworks, Linux, and others.[5] Judgment was split in two parts. On April 3, 2000, he issued his conclusions of law, according to which Microsoft had committed monopolization, attempted monopolization, and tying in violation of Sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act.[17] Microsoft immediately appealed the decision.[18]

The government may have agreed to a settlement on appeal but Microsoft lost the initial suit.

You seem to be unaware that the tying claims in the Microsoft case were specifically overturned by the appeals court.

Overturned by the appeals court. The reason Microsoft appealed is because they lost the lawsuit, and then settled on appeal. The claim in question:

> "Microsoft didn't lose any lawsuit in the US for for tying its web browser to Windows"

is false.

If you want to be pedantic, yes, the district court did indeed rule against Microsoft with regards to the tying claim.

However, when most people discuss the result of a lawsuit you can generally infer they are referring to the ultimate decision after all appeals are exhausted (as opposed to any particular intermediate decision which could get reversed and then reversed again).

Since the appeals court overturned that particular claim, one could reasonably argue that the district judge ruled incorrectly, and in the eyes of the legal system Microsoft, did not, actually lose.

(Note that I am speaking here only in regards to the tying claim, as the appeals court did affirm that Microsoft lost on several of the other claims related to Windows licensing for OEMs.)

It seems weird to consider any other interpretation, to be honest.

Suppose B was accused of murder, initially convicted, then exonerated on appeal.

“B is a convicted murderer; true or false?”

“B was convicted of murder; true or false?”

If your answers are “false to the first but true to the second”, I’d wager you are frequently misunderstood by other people in conversations.

It makes sense to talk about verdicts when comparing cases, as is the context here.

"X was convicted for doing Y, but Z was not convicted for doing >>Y" is an interesting comparison, even if (or especially if) X later won an appeal.

In what way was that an inaccurate description? Did you read your own source?

> Microsoft didn't lose any lawsuit in the US for for tying its web browser to Windows

Microsoft did lose the suit in 1999. They then appealed and settled with the DOJ a few years later.

The problem here is that your definition of the product is far too coarse. You can only really talk about competition for products which are truly equivalent. For an extreme example of why too coarse a definition of the product might yield a bad understanding of monopolies. Say that there was a food company and a water company. You might argue that both of these companies are competing in the space of "products that you need to live", but I clearly need both things, so sales do not form a zero sum game between the two companies.

So why is facebook a monopoly? For the simple reason that having access to your friends on facebook and having access to your friends on tiktok is not a zero sum game. There is a limited amount of tradeoff between the two, but it is expected for consumers to want both, creating intrinsic opportunities for the two companies to cooperate, instead of compete.

The problem is that competition is measured more or less as how anti-correlated demand for two products is, or approximately, How much less price sensitive my demand for the "sum" of the products is than for just one of them. If this is your measure, then you see that facebook and Tiktok don't compete all that much.

One easy way to fix some of these problems is by requiring something like XMPP. Peering between IM providers would make these things a lot more fungible. Google abandoned XMPP, hwich was very popular, for their inferior chat application, for a reason, and the only reason that I own any Apple products is because of iMessage.

I'm not sure you made the case for why facebook is a monopoly. They don't hold a monopoly on friends list online. Everywhere I go from instagram, tiktok, snapchat, xbox, etc. They many of a monopoly on your friends attention but communication can exist outside of these networks.

Why require XMPP, if XMPP is a superior product people will find it and use it.

You may need food and water but you don't need a certain brand of tuna because everyone else is using it.

It sounds like facebook purchased a new big screen tv invited everyone over for free. All of your friends went over tonight and you want to shutdown the party so everyone will go somewhere else you approve of.

It sounds like you didn't understand the argument.

Perhaps your definition is too granular. At the end of the day these products compete for your attention (or time). It's a zero sum game. So yes, Tiktok does compete with facebook because hours in a day is a fixed quantity and you have to choose where to spend them.

The question is not if they compete, but how much. It's not a zero sum game, because both parties are better off for having played.

It's just politics. US messes up European corporations such as Alstom and EU messes up FB, AAPL et tal. Everything wrapped up under some political correct flags (human rights, environment, there are plenty to insert here.)

Even worse, only Apple's browser is allowed to have extensions on the iPhone. Every other browser is programmatically blocked from doing so. If that's not abusing your position in one market to crowd out competition in another, I don't know what is.

Different times. Different concerns.

> The FB case in US seems a bit stupid as what exactly do they have a monopoly on.

I have no idea what this measures, but Googling "Facebook markert share" shows lots of results over 50%: https://gs.statcounter.com/social-media-stats

> An upcomer like Tiktok can upstage them and create its own space out of nowhere in a couple of years.

Is it a requirement of a monopoly that no competitor could possibly come and grab part of the market? Like as soon as one manages to do that, there's no longer a monopoly, despite the relative market shares?

Also, I'm not sure I'd see them as direct competitors per se - in some spaces yes, but not in every space. TikTok is great for people who want to post videos, but not everyone is into posting videos. (Not sure why YouTube is listed on that page either, for the same reason.)

I think if TikTok started as an American company and didn't have access to the FB-free Chinese market then it would have been crushed by Facebook in the American market before it could grow.

Tiktok does not have access to the FB-free Chinese market.

Yes it does. TikTok is known as Douyin in China. The company that owns TikTok is headquartered in Beijing, and Douyin was operating in China for years before TikTok was released in the west.

I'm aware of Douyin. However, TikTok and Douyin are different apps with different users. The product named TikTok did not establish itself in China first.

I looked at the stat counter link. I am not sure what metric it is quoting but it seems incorrect. Facebook has 75% users, while Instagram has just 4%? Both are billion user apps.

Also, unlike someone using an iOS phone or Android phone the same people are on several different apps. So how is it counting the users to be exclusive to a particular product. Like a lot of Tiktok audience is on Instagram as well. A lot of Twitter users use Instagram as well .

No product can lock you in like a platform can. I can use HN, Reddit, WhatsApp, Signal without any one product interfering my usage of the other one.

> The FB case in US seems a bit stupid as what exactly do they have a monopoly on. They don't own a paltform as such. An upcomer like Tiktok can upstage them and create its own space out of nowhere in a couple of years.

Because Facebook is big and robust enough to take a few on the chin in order to make it look like "something is being done", which ultimately protects the industry from actual oversight and regulation.

Apple and Google are far and away the biggest monopolies of our time, yet the amount of scrutiny they receive is thin.

Both of these companies illegally collude and have even been caught doing it.

Apple owns 50%+ of modern American consumer computing. They tax all of it. You can't repair your stuff and have to buy into an expensive ecosystem. You can't run a non-Apple browser or your own software. The 1984 dream of trusted computing that we bought hook, line, and sinker and are now paying the protection racket price for.

As much as I hate ads, their tight control and singular policy changes have repeatedly caused multi-billion dollar ripples in the industry. Facebook is having to build a new market. That's a sign of a monopoly.

Google controls the web. They control search. The browser. Slowly the web is turning into Google hosted AMP, sites bearing adsense, and sites that only run in Chrome.

Both of them sell movies and music and are morphing into studios. They're both trying to get into payments and dominate fintech. This is too broad to compete with.

Both of them need a hard regulatory shaking.

> As much as I hate ads, their tight control and singular policy change has made multi-billion dollar ripples in the industry. That's a sign of a monopoly.

Yeah, it might be good for the user but a company making a change that shakes the industry like this is worrying. Worse bit is, it helps them as well as they have an ads product which might do well when others can't do better personalised advertising.

> Both of them sell movies and music and are morphing into studios. They're both trying to get into payments and dominate fintech. This is too broad to compete with.

Agreed. There is no way other companies can meaningfully compete with them. Look at Apple and Airpods. The revenue just Airpod makes for Appple is multiples of revenue of Sennheiser and Bose combined.

I teach antitrust and competition to undergrads and grad students.

None of what you have described in this paragraph is an antitrust violation, not by a mile:

"While look at Apple. They have more than 50% share of mobile devices in US and their devices are actual platforms. They own it from bare silicon to device to OS to apps to services to accessories. Their own products get first class support while others can't integrate as well. Their web browser has no real competition on mobile, so mobile web for more than 50% of users is at their mercy."

To the extent that the following sentence relates to the fees they set on their app store, it might allege an antitrust violation:

"They get unfair advantage for their music streaming services etc."

But the optimal regulation of platforms is very much an unsettled area of thinking.

The reason regulators have not focused on the behavior of Apple which you complain about is really simple: none of it is an antitrust violation.

The case against Apple starts with recognizing that vertical markets aren't all the same. The market for phones isn't the same as the market for apps.

In particular, there are two separate app markets. A phone customer can choose Android or iOS. An app developer can't choose which store to use to distribute their apps. They have to use the one their customer uses. If they have customers on both, they have to use both, and have no choice.

The analogy would be two huge landlords that together own all the real estate in a city and also own the only two shipping companies in the city. A "real estate customer" has a choice in where to live. An online retailer doesn't get to choose where their customers live. The two shipping companies each only ship to the customers who live in that company's apartments.

The online retailer, who is the customer of the shipping company, has no choice in what shipping company to use. If their own customer lives in one company's apartments, they must use that shipping company. It's a shipping monopoly. There is a significant identifiable set of destinations for which no other provider of shipping services exists, and none can exist because the same company prohibits anyone else from delivering to them. Either that's an antitrust violation or we need new antitrust laws.

> But the optimal regulation of platforms is very much an unsettled area of thinking.

Isn't this the thing that gets settled in court by prosecuting a case against them?

> FB case in US seems a bit stupid as what exactly do they have a monopoly on

We got popular interest in antitrust. Unfortunately, that's drawn Spitzer types in both the U.S. and EU. Khan and Vestager have a penchant for bringing inchoate cases with headline potential. (The "FTC’s inability to offer [a federal court] any indication of the metric(s) or method(s) it used to calculate Facebook’s market share" being Exhibit A for their breathtaking incompetence [1].)

Hopefully this combination of sustained popular interest and transatlantic executive incompetence spurs legislatures into redrawing 20th century antitrust rules.

[1] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.224...

I have lost hope on lawmakers doing anything meaningful here which can actually prevent the market domination misuse happening right now. I don't know if it is incompetence or lobbying.

Amazon AWS shifts in its seat

The problem is that technical people who clearly see these issues suffer from echo-chamber paralysis. They complain to each other from behind their keyboards, but never take action.

I'm a somewhat technical person and I don't think it's all that clear. Apple isn't perfect, but their customers are mostly happy with their tech.

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