> "The FTC's lawsuit against Meta defies reality. The evidence at trial will show what every 17-year-old in the world knows: Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp compete with Chinese-owned TikTok, YouTube, X, iMessage and many others," Meta spokesperson Chris Sgro said in a statement.
Everyone knew at the time that Facebook bought Instagram because it threatened Facebook's dominance, and hindsight shows that exactly that happened. There's a huge swath of people that dropped off FB and now use Insta, but Meta owns both. It was a great move but it was absolutely anti-competitive at the time.
We have Zuckerberg's emails. No need to claim anything. He said it out loud:
“There are network effects around social products and a finite number of different social mechanics to invent. Once someone wins at a specific mechanic, it’s difficult for others to supplant them without doing something different.”
“One way of looking at this is that what we’re really buying is time. Even if some new competitors springs up, buying Instagram, Path, Foursquare, etc now will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get close to their scale again. Within that time, if we incorporate the social mechanics they were using, those new products won’t get much traction since we’ll already have their mechanics deployed at scale.”
Forty-five minutes later:
“I didn’t mean to imply that we’d be buying them to prevent them from competing with us in any way,”
> “I didn’t mean to imply that we’d be buying them to prevent them from competing with us in any way,”
Isn't what matters in the end is whether there is still an effective market left as a result?
It seems that Mark himself is arguing that by the nature of the network effects of social media, first movers have a natural monopoly advantage that's hard to break.
The regulators should be focusing on that - ie enforcing rules which limit the monopoly advantage due to network effects.
Take the telecomms space - if somebody got first mover on a phone system and it wasn't interoperable with any others - then once established they would have a monopoly. The way you break that is to force interoperability - not allow companies to use access to the network as a competition barrier.
An example in the Meta space - as far as I can tell it was not possible for me to send a message to somebody in Whatsapp without going via whatsapp - ie there is no network access from a different app.
This appears to be exactly what the EU is focussed on - enforcing interop.
If it was some insignificant photo sharing app with 13 employees why did they pay a billion dollars for it? Everyone knew when the sale closed exactly what they were doing.
On the other hand the top ten comments as a whole are 3 bullish, 5 neutral, 2 bearish which is certainly not an overwhelming sentiment in any direction. That's despite the fact that bullish comments on start-ups tend to get more votes because it's a start-up community.
Sure, plenty of people thought that it was a good purchase, but my point is nobody thought of it as buying out their competition. The transition into a social media platform and algorithmic content machine occurred under Facebook's direction.
> "Where's the money in Instagram?" Preventing Instagram from developing into something that has a negative effect on Facebook. It's a "keep your enemies closer" move.
HN is notorious for this kind of thing, such as the iPod: "less space than a nomad, no wireless, lame". Due to not understanding how much consumers value simplicity.
Every time I see a comment accusing HN of having some specific consensual position like a hive mind, I go back and see comments both contradicting and supporting the stance. In other words, different opinions. Every single time I check, and every single time it shows the original commenter engaged in selection bias.
This case is particularly wrong, as that iPod quote is from Slashdot. HN didn’t even exist in 2001.
But hindsight of HN is different from hindsight of FaceBook.
FaceBook was literally collecting data on what apps people were using on their phones and empirically saw the rise of Instagram. Of course the rise of Instagram didn't need to continue but that's why you buy all the realistic competitors so even if most of them fail you have a moat of dead companies.
After trying to set up wireless on my printer interface and enter a password with up and down arrows rotating through an entire set of keys, I'm fairly convinced that no wireless on the iPod was massively correct. If people were expected to set up wifi by entering a password with a rotation device adoption would be miniscule.
Dunno why the internet enjoys dunking so much on a poor anonymous poster who guessed wrong about a product that would catch on, whether that's the iPod, the iPad, Dropbox, etc.
We don't seem to spend half as much energy taking major news outlets to task when they similarly guess wrong, unless we feel that somehow adding a question mark negates any responsibility (i.e. "The Ouya will revolutionize gaming" vs. "Will the Ouya revolutionize gaming?").
It's a recurring cognitive dissonance between cynical tech people and the actual mass market. I mean I'm cynical about most things but the ones that aren't and who get onto the hype train earn big money off of it.
Those people aren't putting in their own money. The people who did put their money into Instagram got to see behind the corporate covers, and they decided to buy anyway. It's very easy to say whether you'd invest $1B if you're not putting in any of your money.
> If it was some insignificant photo sharing app with 13 employees why did they pay a billion dollars for it? Everyone knew when the sale closed exactly what they were doing.
HP bought palm for 1.2 billion dollars and then did nothing with it. Why is doing something anti competitive but doing nothing not? I’m sure there are other examples than the hp/palm situation.
The conversations at that time were definitely about how Instagram had the heat that Facebook was losing. I felt there was no question that they were neutralizing a competitor.
(WhatsApp only had, like, 50 employees when FB bought it for $19B, as a bit of evidence that headcount isn’t necessarily a measure of value.)
If they bought both Instagram and Snapchat it would have been neutralizing competition. Instagram acquisition was just a business staying relevant after a youth market grew up and soured on them while the next younger ones wanted something else cooler designed for 100% around mobile.
I believe intention and behaviour matters much more to antitrust than simply continuing to be a dominant market leader by smartly staying on top of what the public wants. Google search doing horizontal integration into Android and Chrome to cut off competition's market entry points at lower levels is far more plausible antitrust narrative IMO.
They tried to buy Snapchat multiple times and the guy refused after seeing how much Facebook valued Instagram and thought he could get more than a billion.
Yes it was between the two if I remember correctly. If they bought both it'd be crossing into near total monopoly, at least before Tiktok took off. But they are pretty far from that now IMO. At least in terms of competition from tons of other services. It's possible they did other shady things outside of that.
Right I looked it up. They bought Instagram in 2012 and tried to buy Snapchat a year later.
Since it didn't happen it's pretty moot to the discussion. M&As with massive market consolidation like that get challenged all the time in courts so it's hard to say what would have happened then.
FTC investigated the Instagram purchase in 2012 and chose not to interfere.
So failed acquisition doesn't make buying Instagram inherently an anticompetitive move, just maybe can be spun as their strategy at the time, but a decade later the market still has plenty of players so it will be a tough case to make. Although even a failed case gives the government leverage over Meta with threats of future ones so they might not care.
Since the discussion is entirely about their motivation in buying Instagram, it’s certainly not moot at all. They wanted to have a monopoly and remove the competition. That was the motivation.
The FTC investigation specifically had a condition that they would reevaluate the acquisition in coming years. This was widely expected to be done, and everyone knew about it at the time of the acquisition.
We can't claim that _everyone_ knew. But it was obvious to anyone paying attention, and also to all of us who bailed out of facebook as they became more toxic.
The actual simple photo sharing site was Flickr.
Instagram was seen from the start as a SNS with photo sharing as a pretense. The other SNS were already photo centric either way.
I'm more concerned with YouTube owning all of social video. Movies are on a dozen streamers. Social stuff is on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, and X. But video essays, independent animation, educational content, cultural critiques, music, video podcasts, trailers, gameplay, research, news - anything long form, serious, interesting - it's all trapped on YouTube as the only distribution platform. And they'll keep getting bigger with no possible alternative due to network effects.
I'm even more concerned with Amazon being a conglomerate [1] that is in online sales, hyperscaler infrastructure, consumer hardware, home automation systems, grocery stores, medicine, primary care, and movie production. And that they can leverage these synergies in grossly unfair ways.
I'm most concerned that the Apple / Google duopoly in mobile, web, and search has entrenched these two players across the vast majority of online transactions, interactions, and computational device usages. They collect margin on everything. They own your devices, they own search, they own the web, they own the apps, they have to be paid off to rank your business, have to be paid off to collect money, they regulate what you can do with your apps and websites, etc. etc. You jump through their hoops. This is their internet.
[1] Especially given the fact that Amazon can subsidize their efforts in these areas from profits in other business units and out-compete viable businesses in those markets. They can offer goods for free with an existing subscription and advertise far and wide across their retail website, plastered on their packaging, and emblazoned on the side of their delivery vehicles. Lord of the Rings got an 80 million dollar advertising package for free, whereas Bong Joon Ho's far more deserving film got next to nothing.
Not everyone on hackernews gets it. There are quite a few people on here involved with or responsible for the awful things that get brought up, but they’re paid enough to actually convince themselves we simply don’t understand why it’s necessary.
Or they just have a different opinion than you. The GP comment was misleading saying there is "no possible" option due to network effects. You absolutely can upload to rumble or floatplane or other sites that have their own networks. People should be praising YouTubes model to pay the channels for content. In an alternate universe, Microsoft is renting you cloud storage by the gb with 3-tier plans and thousands of people use it to share videos with their families.
Laws, content moderation, and moderation obligations had created an insurmountable barrier to entry to fix that. Though abolishing those hard and soft laws can't be a solution for various reasons.
Meta's stuff gets a lot of attention because it's flashy and tied to social media drama, but the structural power of Amazon, YouTube, Apple, and Google is way scarier long-term. They're not just dominating products - they're controlling infrastructure. Distribution, discovery, monetization - the whole stack.
What’s surprising to me about the dominance of YouTube is the fact that 1) unlike all the social networks there is very little network effect with YouTube, and 2) there are perfectly to viable alternatively such as Vimeo that are routinely bypassed.
> I'm more concerned with YouTube owning all of social video. Movies are on a dozen streamers. Social stuff is on Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, and X. But video essays, independent animation, educational content, cultural critiques, music, video podcasts, trailers, gameplay, research, news - anything long form, serious, interesting - it's all trapped on YouTube as the only distribution platform. And they'll keep getting bigger with no possible alternative due to network effects.
Yes, but: despite all of us adblocking them, this is all supported by their ad revenue.
The discovery effect is simply too powerful. I can't really see a way out of this because people are not going to go back to paying for media. Possibly the only way is something like the increasing control of social media from the EU forcing a separate EU Youtube, which might include things like the French TV rules forcing a certain amount of content to be in French, plus control over foreign disinformation influencers.
(you know what the only other social video platforms are with millions of users? Bilibili, xiaohungshu etc.)
Facebook was leveraging Onavo at the time to understand growth trends in competitors. They 100% acquired Instagram and WhatsApp because their growth trends posed threats to the Blue app.
> When Facebook acquired it, Instagram was a photo sharing app that had 13 employees.
Sure, but it was a serious threat to Facebook with hordes of especially younger people moving away from FB in favor of more activity on Instagram, which at that time had evolved from "just" a photo making/sharing app to a social network.
No. Mobile Camera Apps were a threat to non mobile first facebook. ("Instagram is a photo service in a sea of other photo services.")
Any one of them could have taken off and eaten facebook's lunch. Instagram was the winner in a sea of camera apps because facebook threw unlimited resources into the hip app of the moment.
> When Facebook acquired it, Instagram was a photo sharing app that had 13 employees.
And growing quickly, so:
> In his opening remarks, Mr. Matheson mentioned documents, including what he described as a “smoking gun” February 2012 email in which Mr. Zuckerberg discussed the rise of Instagram and the importance of “neutralizing a potential competitor.” In another email, in November 2012 to Ms. Sandberg, the chief operating officer at the time, Mr. Zuckerberg wrote, “Messenger isn’t beating WhatsApp, Instagram was growing so much faster than us that we had to buy them for $1 billion.”
> The F.T.C. showed Mr. Zuckerberg a 2011 email in which he wrote, “We really need to get our act together quickly on this since Instagram is growing so fast.”
> It’s a combination of neutralizing a competitor and improving Facebook, Zuckerberg said in a reply. “There are network effects around social products and a finite number of different social mechanics to invent. Once someone wins at a specific mechanic, it’s difficult for others to supplant them without doing something different.”
> Zuckerberg continued: “One way of looking at this is that what we’re really buying is time. Even if some new competitors springs up, buying Instagram, Path, Foursquare, etc now will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get close to their scale again. Within that time, if we incorporate the social mechanics they were using, those new products won’t get much traction since we’ll already have their mechanics deployed at scale.”
> Forty-five minutes later, Zuckerberg sent a carefully worded clarification to his earlier, looser remarks.
> “I didn’t mean to imply that we’d be buying them to prevent them from competing with us in any way,” he wrote.
And Whatsapp still has a small team. It has no bearing on the fact that it is more widespread form of communication than text/call/email etc. all over the world under the control of one evil megacorp.
Over the last ~3 years I've been passively following the negative PR campaign against TT by Meta; a lot of the outrage felt a bit manufactured, specifically the outlandish claims like the 'slap a teacher challenge' which, upon investigation, didn't actually exist [0]
The government just kinda forgot that competition law existed for a few decades.
They were busy doing things like bringing freedom and democracy to Afghanistan, having a financial crisis, stuff like that. Very important stuff. Social media? Oh yes I think my grandson told me about that.
At the time, Instagram had 80 million users, it had no monetization strategy and was profitless[1]. I suppose this made it seem less of an immediate competitive threat to Facebook's business model, especially with the presence of other smaller photo sharing platforms by Google etc.
In 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported that FTC officials in 2012 had concerns about the deal raising antitrust issues. However, they were apprehensive about potentially losing an antitrust case in court if they sued to block the deal.[2] If they would lose then on the merits of trying to enforce the Clayton Act, it would set a precedent that likely could not be undone.
I remember hearing from friends at Facebook that an insider story was FB used VPN and in app IP address tracking to identify that instagram and whatsapp were hitting crazy growth metrics and that's how they knew they needed to buy them at all costs
Onavo, the VPN app-company that was repurposed by facebook for market intelligence, was only acquired in 2013, Instagram was acquired a year earlier in 2012.
But before 2013 there were methods on both iOS and Android for an App to get a list of all OTHER installed apps on the device.
Facebook had the means to know exactly at which rate each app was growing and how many of the users they have to share with it, the facebook app itself was gathering this info.
They could gather enough data to even calculate how much user-attention they lose after each app is installed on a users' device.
--
Onavo was then acquired in 2013, right when Apple started to lock-down those app-scanning methods with iOS7.
So it appears that the company was acquired to be able to KEEP doing something they have already been doing before that with the facebook app.
Something being predicted poorly, hypothetically, doesn’t mean you can’t rectify a past mistake, right?
Not specifically related to this case, necessarily, but if you let an acquisition go through and discover a decade later that it was, in fact, anticompetitive (and intentionally so), presumably you would still try to break up the resulting monopoly, even if you didn’t predict it would happen?
B) despite all branches of government going after Alcoa (Congress passing a special law to support the case mid way through), nothing happened upon remanding the case to the lower court due to the successful argument that other companies began competing
C) that would never happen now primarily due to only anticompetitive practices being scrutinized, not merely having the ability to control prices. But now I see where the confusion comes from, a 13 year saga in support of the Sherman Act
D) it’s so interesting how much the country changed solely from trying to differentiate itself from communism. So its gone to more of an extreme of private maximum extractable value.
That explains changes in priorities, but it does not make for great jurisprudence to have their unanimous decision revoked.
They could argue that the decision was made based on declarations that did not align with the private conversation that Zuckerberg had at the time, as those emails came out since.
I think "everyone" in this case means: people who knew the business and had an adversarial perception of Facebook's intentions. This was apparently not how the FTC thought at the time.
Hell, even I wasn't this cynical back in those days. I was shocked as late as 2018 when Facebook began using SMS phone numbers for advertising, something they'd promised not to do (for obvious reasons.) https://www.cbsnews.com/news/facebook-said-to-use-peoples-ph...
I've never had a Facebook account, other than a burner for the brief time I spent investigating VR via Oculus Quest 2.
I almost had one once, some time in the very early 2010s. After first login, the first prompt I saw was for my email account's authentication details, so that Facebook could "find my contacts for me."
I forget the exact language they used, but I know a boundary test when I see one, and I completed neither that nor any other further onboarding step, but immediately "deleted" the account - understanding this would not actually remove any information, but would deny me at least the temptation to develop what I could see would become a dangerous habit.
I don't exactly think I blame people who were slower to catch on, which is a relief, considering that appears at one time or another to have been about half the species and it would be a lot of work. But I would incline much less to say that mistrusting Facebook as early as 2018 would have been cynical, than that still to have trusted them so late seems remarkably naïve.
A move being anti-competitive and it being against anti-trust law are not the same thing. You also need to establish that the defendant is improperly exercising their own size/market-power to force the deal through which is a much higher bar.
Also the FTC is not exactly known for enforcing antitrust law very strictly.
The combination of neoliberal laissez-faire economics along with how strongly tech supported President Obama's campaigns meant that the industry got to run amok for a decade. It's easily one of the biggest stains on his presidency in hindsight.
Partly our regulatory system unfortunately was timid and defanged and philosophically approving of a lot of mergers in general (neoliberalism + Laissez Fair Conservatives). The FTC didn't do the discovery to get the smoking gun email of Zuckerburg saying how he was doing the buyout specifically to "neutralize a potential competitor," (as The New York Times reported).
To anyone on the side of anti-trust, it was clear even without that email as to how much Instagram and WhatsApp were growing, and thus Facebook was Standard Oiling.
If there are 7 different grocery stores in driving distance of my house and two of them merge, I've still got a choice of 6 stores so there's still reasonable competition.
If there are 3 different grocery stores and two of them merge, though? That's a different matter.
And if 1 of the remaining 2 is the zero-waste organic store that only rich people and hippies use? It might not even be providing all that much competition.
Yeah, but we're talking about 2012. Instagram was small and wasn't making any money, and feature-wise it barely resembled what it is today. Going just by US sites in 2012 Twitter, Tumblr, Snapchat, Google+, Pinterest, YouTube, and Reddit were all large competing social networks (or social network adjacent sites/apps).
Seems like in your analogy there were plenty of grocery stores left.
People forget that the Android app and the aquisition announcement came out like one week apart. The basic web version didn't come out until half a year later.
My point is it already had a solid rich, influencer-y userbase + was about to become available on more platforms. Aquisition definitely had an impact on the user growth, but the growth itself was already inevitable.
The thing that makes something a competitor is the ability to act as a substitute. That means grocery stores that are 1000 miles away don't count. For photo sharing, what makes something a viable substitute is having a sufficient network effect, so photo sharing services with hundreds of users aren't a substitute for ones with millions.
This implies that mergers between large services that have a network effect should always be prohibited, but why is that even a problem unless your goal is to thwart competition?
It would also create a useful incentive: Federated systems (like email) have a single network that spans entities. If Microsoft wants to buy Hotmail, they're not buying a separate network so you don't have to be worried about it even if they each have 25 million users as long as that's not too large a percentage of the billion people who use email. So then companies would want to participate in federated systems instead of creating silos like modern social networks do, because then they would be as strictly prohibited from doing mergers.
Yes, every horizontal acquisition is anti-competitive.
Antitrust violations are a higher bar, you must improperly flex your dominant market position to violate the law. For that the government would have to show that FB offered an unreasonable price that nobody sane would match or that they threatened to cut off Insta links from FB if they didn't sell, something like that.
Not always. Say you have 4 cell phone carriers. 2 clearly on top and 2 far behind. The two weak ones merging would, on paper, take you from 4 companies to 3. In reality you go from 2 options to 3.
So I have an alternative take on this. I don't agree with your basic facts but I have a different conclusion.
If a company, which had 13 employees at the time of acquisition and was ~2 years old, can be a legitimate threat to Facebook (which it was), then how strong is your monopoly, really?
For context, we've seen this play out multiple times in the last decade: with Snapchat to some degree but now, more importantly, with Tiktok.
Many consider Facebook a relic for old people. IG is rapidly meeting the same fate. It seems to be way more popular with millenials than Zoomers (anecdotally).
My point is that when the cost of user switching to a new platform is as simple as downloading a new app and creating a new login, then your "monopoly" lacks the traditional moat or barrier to entry that antitrust is specifically designed to fight.
Put another way: this just isn't as urgent as people are making it out to be and (IMHO) it's merely a shakedown by the current administration to get Meta to fall in line with censoring topics that the administration doesn't like.
Can you show me something from that time that shows this was the dominate sentiment? Because I remember everyone laughing the Facebook would pay so much for such a simple app.
> Last year, documents for a standalone Facebook mobile photo sharing app were attained by TechCrunch. Now it seems Facebook would rather buy Instagram which comes with a built-in community of photographers and photo lovers, while simultaneously squashing a threat to its dominance in photo sharing.
? Meta owning Instagram and Facebook is the monopoly. Owning things that BILLIONS AND BILLIONS of users use because you want to own them and control them so others don't, that's the monopoly.
Innovation can't happen without Facebook's say-so, that's the monopoly, and over way too many people.
It was a tiny 1 billion dollar acquisition of a company with less than 50 employees. If everyone knew at the time how dominant Instagram would become, that "everyone" sure didn't include the founders and investors in Instagram.
Facebook, wary of someone doing to them what they did to MySpace, was going around buying anyone who might be the next thing. It wasn't necessarily clear that Insta would blow up in the way it did but it was clear that was Facebook's motivation for buying.
> Though Facebook is known for smaller acquisitions, Instagram’s surging momentum likely compelled the social network to swiftly put together a billion-dollar offer.
Tech valuations were lower across the board in 2012. Meta 15x'd its market cap since then, and Google 10x'd its valuation, despite both companies still holding essentially the same market position today as they did back then. If anything both have a weaker position today than in 2012.
Meta's position is much better, they own Insta and Whatsapp now! Diversification!
Google rise makes less sense but their position as king of search seems even more concrete than ever before (although LLMs might threaten that if they don't stay competitive I guess).
You know who else knew how many devices Instagram was on? Instagram. And yet they were willing to sell. There is no conspiracy here. There is nothing nefarious. Facebook made a good bet.
From an actual email from Mark Zuckerberg on February 28th 2012:
> Integrating their products with ours to improve the service is also a factor. But in reality, we already know these companies’ social mechanics, and we will integrate them over the next 12–24 months anyway. The integration plan involves building their mechanics into our products rather than directly integrating their products, if that makes sense, by a combination of these two things: neutralizing a potential competitor, integrating their products with ours to improve the service.
> One way of looking at this is that what we’re really buying is time. Even if some new competitor springs up buying Instagram, Path, Foursquare, et cetera, now will give us a year or more to integrate their dynamics before anyone can get close to their scale again. Within that time, if we incorporate the social mechanics they are using, those new products won’t get much traction because we will already have their mechanics deployed at scale.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
It always cracks me up when Meta trots out the "but look, there's competition now!" argument like that somehow erases the intent behind those acquisitions
I'm guessing that there's just a younger audience, now. We'd just been off the back of two decades of MS buying everything it got near, it was just what the done thing was. Instagram was taking serious oxygen away from facebook at the time; the buyout wasn't so much an "everyone knows it" but almost an inevitability.
Id partially agree. The historical case that time erased is that early app store, apps were exploding and disappearing just as quickly and the eventual "zero-risk" on network apps was enormous at the time. Everyone agreed with the trajectory, but no one had consensus on the permanence.
Everyone knew at the time that Facebook bought Instagram because it threatened Facebook's dominance, and hindsight shows that exactly that happened. There's a huge swath of people that dropped off FB and now use Insta, but Meta owns both. It was a great move but it was absolutely anti-competitive at the time.