This is so weird as a support for the FTC complaint.
My own read. Facebook is fighting for - and likely losing - the attention of younger users.
Tiktok and others are doing relatively well.
This is the problem with these networks, they become your parents network. Myspace gone, friendster gone.
The FTC claims of monopoly are laughable?
Tiktok seems to be crushing Facebook in downloads and in time in app, and now I heard was even crushing youtube (all of these folks are competing, youtube has youtube community and patreon style features now with chat etc as well).
is facebook huge? For sure. Is it a monopoly? Have folks not heard of things like tiktok.
Will be interesting if China goes after tiktok the way the US is going after facebook.
Tik tok doesn't double as a customer service for big companies, Tik tok doesn't have a market place, Tik tok isn't widely used to recruit candidates for jobs.
Tik tok and Facebook are very different social networks. Facebook is way more than that actually. A lot of people all over the world only browser the internet through Facebook, do all their business transaction via Facebook, this is even truer outside the west.
Tik tok and Facebook are very different social networks.
That's entirely irrelevant to the "is Facebook a monopoly" question. If Facebook is losing market share to a very different social network, this still shows Facebook doesn't have absolute control of it's customers and market. I would strong suspect that every rising social network is going to be significantly different from the social network it captures users from.
Facebook competes with linked-in for business stuff, Amazon and craigslist for selling, Tik Tok for youth attention etc.
The main thing is an argument for Facebook being powerful, influential and even abusive isn't by itself an argument for it being a monopoly as such.
The "anti-monopoly" (anti-trust) laws are not only about actual monopolies but rather about having a dominant market position and using that for anti-competitive behavior which is forbidden not only for monopolies but various dominant not-really-monopolies.
Asserting "X is not really a monopoly" is not particularly relevant because that's not the standard which matters. It's perfectly plausible for a not-really-a-monopoly with a large but shrinking market share to abuse a dominant position in a particular market (often defined more narrowly than you might think) in ways that violate anti-trust laws.
Always important to note the philosophy underpinning monopoly differs in the EU and the US.
In particular for US law, this part:
> having a dominant market position and using that for anti-competitive behavior
For the EU, the question can stop there; in the US, there's an additional burden of proof that anti-competitive behavior harms the consumer.
Google is allowed to build a giant search empire because so far, courts have agreed that while it's hard to compete with Google, the consumer is not harmed because a competitor is always a click away and barrier to switching is low.
In this case though seems like there’s plenty of consumers harmed? Here it would be the ad buyers and sellers who cannot use other exchanges and end up paying more or receiving less than they could in a fairer market with the bidding system Google and Facebook colluded to quash.
The argument I've seen is that Facebook is failing to attract young users, more than that it's losing older ones.
After a certain point, maintaining size means sustaining an onboarding pipeline. Tobacco and alcohol ran into this issue, espeically as they were busy killing off their longest a-term and most loyal customers. Facebook's not quite there.
People have said this about every social media app that became major for the past 10 years dude, Snapchat, Insta, TikTok, etc. If anything the batting average for social media companies that "make it" in the public's mind over the past decade is actually pretty good despite the field being heavily advantaged to incumbents by default. Snapchat is arguably the "least cool" on this list today and it still recorded MAUs in the 100 millions. TikTok ain't going anywhere.
More broadly, it turns out that once you are a company with access to billions of dollars, you will utilize that advantage to stay afloat. People still have some idea that if a business is outmanuevered/outgunned by a competitor, they will close down honorably, and that because teens are fickle they'll move on, etc, and this is all super unpredictable and unquantifiable and there's definitely not entire departments (with budgets as large as the GDP of Latin American countries) designed to account for this. You know, like the OP's leaks show Facebook has. Those rules might be true for your little mom and pop business, for your silly little thing. But not for these kinds of companies that can do an arms race for eyeballs to stay afloat, and they do not engage in the same rules as you.
You can rest assured, no matter how much it upsets you, that TikTok will be almost certainly be around longer in its current form than like 95% of the code written by people using this forum today, including your own.
TikTok and Snapchat are fad social networks. They provide communication channels of a specific format that is very "now," and will almost certainly be supplanted down the line. Will they ever disappear? Probably not, but then again people still send old fashioned telegrams, so I'm not sure disappearing is the metric we care about.
Given that the trove of FB documents repeatedly talk about concern of loss of engagement among the youth, the conventional wisdom of 2005 that FB has an inherent lifespan because no one wants to be on a social network with their parents, seems to be playing out.
Sure the "three year" timespan is dumb. FB grew way beyond fad, but the predicted generational dynamics didn't magically go away. In fact, it seems like that hypothesis is playing out. What the real question is, can FB buy another hot social network, before they lose both money and skill.
I don't know. I'm practically a Luddite when it comes to social networks, and I've started consuming tiktok content quite a bit lately.
I think the best way to describe it is in relation to twitter, which I use heavy for 2-3 days in a row once every few months. Twitter exposes my to lots of interesting things, but ultimately is depressing because of how everyone is so shrill and unwilling to give the benefit of a doubt, and interactions feel hollow.
Tiktok is just pure entertainment, and rarely do I not come way in a better mood. It's like they took r/videos and r/gifs and distilled them into their core components and deliver them through a fire hose.
Will they be gone in a few years? Maybe, but I doubt it. Whatever they're doing it's working and makes me feel better and happier when I use it, so that's a win.
I’ve tried Tiktok on 3 separate occasions. No matter what interests I select when getting started, 95% of the posts it shows me are nearly naked women.
The whole platform seems to be just a means of getting kids hooked on porn. Not once did any post show up based on my interests.
Maybe I’m just too old to figure it out but I couldn’t find any way to get out of endless posts like that.
It took 2-3 days (probably about an hour of browsing) before it started giving me consistently interesting things. Tiktok has been getting a lot of press lately for how good their algorithm is, and specifically how good it is compared to other social networks, presumably because they have so many more interactions to go on. The trick is that it's not entirely (or even mostly? not sure) driven by likes, it's driven by viewing time. If you don't like something, flick it away and on to the next thing.
> The whole platform seems to be just a means of getting kids hooked on porn.
I don't see anything like that anymore. You know what I see? Science teachers doing cool experiments with physics and chemicals. Makers making cool things in a montage. That guy that does animal facts in funny ways. Dog and cat videos. Comedy.
Apparently commenting on a post will indicate interest too? I know I've seen a comment that said "commenting so I end up on $something-tok", because there's a bunch of sub-tiktoks that people end up on because they've been identified as liking that type of content. It's not exactly something that's easily manually indicated from what I've seen, but it seems to happen well organically.
> Maybe I’m just too old to figure it out but I couldn’t find any way to get out of endless posts like that.
Just bypass them as soon as you identify them as something you aren't interested in. Soon enough you should see things that are more to your liking.
I had the same complaint, supposedly it curated that out quickly when you don't engage with it. I assume that is the biggest common interest new users have.
My biggest problem with TikTok is that it make you feel better when you come away even when you got nothing of value from it. I rarely remember what I saw 5 videos ago even if it's something that I thought was great.
>Tik tok doesn't double as a customer service for big companies, Tik tok doesn't have a market place, Tik tok isn't widely used to recruit candidates for jobs.
Yet. Yet. Yet.
There was a time Facebook had none of these things as well.
I’m now officially at “that point” where I was late to Snapchat and now I haven’t even bothered with TikTok.
Was a very early user on FB (the week it launched at my college), but now I can’t be bothered to keep up.
My kids are probably young enough to be maybe 2-3 cycles removed from whatever the Next Big App is, but I can’t even really fathom what those might be and I can assure you I won’t understand them.
I think Facebook's stated goal is at odds with the way the platform presents itself and how people use it.
Facebook should be a great way to connect with people new and old and keep in touch with other people's lives and maybe plan real life events. But Facebook's home page is a newsfeed that rarely shows you posts from friends that you care about and you have to go out of your way to make use of the platform's better features. Also, since most people don't unfriend/unfollow old connections, as time goes on, Facebook's utility naturally goes down.
The anti-trust stuff is also about Instagram. Isn't FB the service losing young folks largely to Instagram?
Anyway, everything about monopoly is about the market space. FB has no monopoly in places-to-post-stuff-and-get-attention-online… except in the many many countries that FB successfully took over where there is near-zero use of the rest the internet, but those cases don't apply to U.S. anti-trust law.
FB has more monopoly power in some other market areas. Not a complete monopoly, but they have a lot of dominance in the market space of targetted social-driven advertising.
Let’s reframe: Facebook is competing in the market of having their button or Javascript on every webpage if the world. Google Analytics, Google Fonts, Facebook, Twitter all 4 have features which require JS (“share”, “login” or “analytics”) or can collect page loads and addresses, thus able to collect user behavior on websites that are not theirs.
Tiktok only competes on user interests within their app but can’t collect user profiles elsewhere. In terms of privacy, they’re harmless compared to FB/Google/Twitter.
That's not entirely accurate - TikTok does have a JS "pixel" implementation that website owners put on their site, mainly to track conversions. It's true that the use case makes it less popular than a like / share button. I research these JS snippets and how they work, and I can say that without a doubt the TikTok pixel is the most complex and network intensive one. It without doubt collects a lot of information. As more advertisers move to TikTok, i see this pixel implemented in more and more websites.
All this reminds me of MTV in the late-90s/early-2000s. We all watched it, even though we all pretty much hated it. Then, something magical happened: the internet became a content platform (MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, etc.), and MTV became basically irrelevant - my teenage niece-and-nephew don't even know what MTV is. And this seems to have happened to Facebook; it's still popular with the olds, obviously, but once again, my teenage niece-and-nephew don't have accounts on Facebook. They laughed when I asked them about it, said Facebook was "annoying", just like us olds thought MTV was annoying back in the day.
Not really adding much value to this whole conversation; just an observation.
Facebook is a monopoly because it does its best to make the switching costs sky-high and keep them that way. There are many people who would delete Facebook or Instagram or WhatsApp but they literally can't because that's where their friends are.
It also does its best to control the experience end-to-end to make sure no one can innovate their way out of these algorithmic feeds and ads. People aren't building better client apps because they fear getting sued. Imagine using Facebook but doing so via a comfortable UI that puts you first, gives you complete control, and allows you stuff like cross-posting to other services. This is their nightmare.
And another problem: the US government is on their side from what I see happening (disclaimer: I'm not from US). It should be such that if they do try to sue you over a browser extension or an unofficial app or whatever, they would get laughed out of the court because you were in your right to do what you did. But unfortunately, there are apparently laws that do allow them to sue people trying to improve their own user experience on someone else's online service.
High switching costs and controlling the experience end-to-end may be anti-competitive business practices, but it doesn't make Facebook a monopoly. Apple also uses similar practices, but clearly has a lot of competition.
Monopoly definition:
the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service
FB has exclusive possession/control of digital connections to most of your friends and family. Apple doesn't have network effects like FB. Network effects + high switching costs = monopoly.
Why doesn't FB let other businesses else access friend lists via API? or send people messages via API? Same with Google and all their data about you. They just can't do it.
Exactly, the second Facebook publishes a new API, no matter how many permission dialogues you have to jump through, the NYT will be champing at the bit to write another "data sharing agreement" story.
They love to take the most bad-faith reading of the API docs to say that Facebook is giving your data away (see their story about netflix/messenger, or Microsoft's Facebook client for Windows phones)
> Apple also uses similar practices, but clearly has a lot of competition.
FWIW, Apple is a monopoly as far as iOS app distribution goes. They act as if they own the relationships between app developers and their users. This stifles innovation. They also keep playing moral police even though they have no obligation to do this (as in, "you have to change the ToS of your service to be allowed to have an iOS app").
A company doesn't have to be a Hasbro monopoly to be guilty of illegal anti-competitive behavior. Take the alleged collusion between Google and Facebook that was revealed recently: does it matter if Facebook or Google are monopolies or not? Hell no! It's illegal as hell (allegedly) whether they're multi-billion dollar companies or struggling startups.
I agree that the regulatory question of whether FB meets the technical requirements of being classed a 'monopoly' is unclear. However, I see the real worry for FB here as going beyond one anti-trust action, it's the building cultural consensus and growing political momentum to "do something". That kind of tidal wave is hard to reverse and difficult to escape unscathed.
I also agree that as pervasive and pernicious as FB is today, it is under serious growing threat from alternatives as well as already "jumping the shark" perceptually with young users. Together those twin storms on the horizon comprise a long-term threat to FB's dominance and relevance. That said, FB's revenue will likely continue 'up and to the right' for several years before the impact is seen in their financials.
When government is through with these platforms, they might already be far more irrelevant. I don't know anyone that has Facebook as a large part in their lives. That said, being overly compliant to external pressure made these platforms a lot less attractive. Youtubes official channels seem like bad TV, a reason why many fled to platforms like it in the first place. Instead of promoting its strengths, it relapsed towards a bygone understanding of media, with official and safe content for allegedly everybody (which doesn't really exist outside a lowest common denominator).
Doesn't any anti-trust investigation on Facebook likely include Instagram, WhatsApp or any of the other ~hundred companies they've acquired[1] and indulged in anti-competitive practices?
> My own read. Facebook is fighting for - and likely losing - the attention of younger users.
100% agree. Mark's seen the numbers and he knows the demographic ship is sailing. That's why he's leaning so heavily into Metaverse. He wants his company to compete in 3D/VR/AR/games.
Even more amusingly the SEC whistleblower protection she's claiming is for securities fraud, that FB is committing fraud overstating its company health to investors.
You kind of make the case for the FTC, don't you? If Facebook were just the Facebook app, website and social network then it wouldn't be a monopoly. They would have to try to appeal to younger users to compete with TikTok and others. But Facebook is way more than just Facebook. Facebook also owns WhatsApp, Instagram, and much much more, hence the monopoly power.
"Reels users said they sometimes stopped the sessions early, finding it hard to hit the 10 minutes required because the videos were “stale, boring or repetitive,” while TikTok users self-reported using the app for hours a day beyond the study. The Reels users also found that Facebook’s algorithm didn’t stop showing them content they weren’t interested in, and rarely showed videos made by people of color to white viewers."
obvious they can't innovate on their own at this point
Are you being facetious? If they can't innovate and they are losing customers, how does that support breaking them up? It seems to make the opposite point.
Lots of monopolies suck at their core business - because they've lost the need to compete due to either suffocating the competition or growing into adjacent markets to lock down their user base. Facebook can both be incompetent and an economic danger.
So if, when Standard Oil was still operating as a monopoly, a single well had decided to refuse to sell to them - or even a dozen wells - or a conglomerate of wells - that means they'd no longer be a monopoly?
Just because you don't own 100% of a market doesn't mean you don't have a commanding position.
1) Comparing Tik Tok to a single oil well is laughable.
2) If someone who owned a single oil well in time of Standard Oil could get their oil to consumers and profitably sell it, then however big Standard Oil might be, then it didn't have a standard monopoly. Of course, that's not how things work back then. Standard Oil controlled the refineries and so well owners were over a barrel. Facebook has tried to control the Internet pipes but basically failed everywhere.
Is your argument that if they got broken up they could innovate more to ... get more people to spend more time on new products that push them into radicalized rabbit holes?
>All told, Facebook has 174 million daily active users in the U.S., according to the internal data. By comparison, Google-owned YouTube has 122 million
If you want to see basically any video online, from funny cats to Facebook depositions, you're using YT. It seems to me that if you're an "internet user", at least in this countries I've know anything about, you're a "YT user".
Perhaps "daily active user" is just too short an interval to measure Youtube users by. Everyone on the internet uses Youtube, but not many use it daily.
They got a new CEO who actually cared about engineers. Some of his first acts were open sourcing things, actually participating in open source and contributing, and supporting Linux.
When Nadella started, I actually said to others that for the first time in my career I would consider working at Microsoft.
Also they sold the shit out of Azure. Every big enterprise contract would include $500,000 of Azure credit for free, and the sales reps would constantly remind you that you're going to lose your free money. So CIOs would say, "Hey we have all this credit we should use it" and then all of a sudden their company was using Azure and liking it (because it's a pretty great platform if you're already using a ton of MS products in your enterprise).
It's no coincidence Nadella was in charge of Azure before being CEO. He knows how to make things developers actually like.
There's more than this. This covers what might happen at a tech company, but what about all those other companies that don't employ developers? Well, Microsoft also has Azure Active Directory and Office 365. Replacing expensive AD and Exchange servers -- and the employees to manage them -- with a simple monthly subscription makes a pretty convincing case to a lot of companies. Especially those that would like to minimize IT as much as possible, because it's not a core competency.
Yes, and all of those not-primarily-software industries haven't yet caught on that unconditionally using SaaS is not a good idea, while at least some software companies are realizing this now. In SW land the pendulum starts to come back from SaaS-all-the-way, outside SW land it's still in full swing to SaaS-all-day-every-day.
I don't agree with you, but even if I did, Microsoft is probably best positioned to take advantage of such a trend, since they have the most seamless experience going from their cloud products to their hosted products.
I don't think the pendulum will swing all the way back in either direction. I think everyone will settle on some things being SaaS and some being self hosted.
One culture mostly evaporated due to the consent decree. The people left fought over resources and fiefdoms of what was left/ within new parameters. Ballmer left, Satya built a new culture with new values. Sounds pedantic but that's truly it.
Financially, cloud has become an extraordinary profit machine for Microsoft, far beyond anything traditional consumer Windows ever has been (for a long time obviously it was far and away the cash cow).
Their operating income margin, for a company so massive, is mind boggling. $70 billion in operating income from $168b in sales (41.6%). By comparison it was 28% in 2013. So their margin has rather dramatically re-expanded during the Nadella era, like they're a younger company again. I think Microsoft is benefiting from not gorging and becoming obese again (employee count vs sales) as it did during the late Gates years and the Ballmer years. Microsoft could trivially load up on people for no great reason other than to always be expanding to fill the margin (many companies do that), but they seem to have made a conscious decision to be more disciplined. I bet that's working in their favor, as high levels of bloat usually acts like quicksand for larger older companies. They're probably more nimble now than when they had half the sales back in 2013. Nadella seemed immediately able to relax on the Windows-everything philosophy in a way Gates and Ballmer were unable to (they were perhaps too wed to the first chapter of Microsoft, people get blinded by such biases, even very smart people). And to his credit, Gates didn't try to get in Nadella's way as he made changes, Gates had been chairman of Microsoft from 1981 to 2014, with his stature and financial capabilities he could have been a real slag in the way of change.
I saw it first hand being in a different F500 company.
Basically all the old tools were written in excel/word/ppt and it was cheaper to just subscribe to O365 than to switch. Monetizing yearly subscriptions is way more profitable than waiting every 5-10 years for people to buy the next version.
Yes. The antitrust suit seems to be a tool for legal discovery. And its a nice way to apply pressure from all sides to make Zuck feel the burn.
This is about the government getting its hands into moderation and content control on Facebook. I'm not sure how I feel about that. Not saying it's good or bad, but that's what this is.
My own read. Facebook is fighting for - and likely losing - the attention of younger users.
Tiktok and others are doing relatively well.
This is the problem with these networks, they become your parents network. Myspace gone, friendster gone.
The FTC claims of monopoly are laughable?
Tiktok seems to be crushing Facebook in downloads and in time in app, and now I heard was even crushing youtube (all of these folks are competing, youtube has youtube community and patreon style features now with chat etc as well).
is facebook huge? For sure. Is it a monopoly? Have folks not heard of things like tiktok.
Will be interesting if China goes after tiktok the way the US is going after facebook.