Comment by SllX
5 days ago
> Not Meta specifically, although Meta as a monopoly on being apple to infrige this rule. (A long time ago, in a capitalism far, far way, America was against monopolies and cartels. Those days will come back.)
I’ve been asking for years here and nobody has made a solid argument to me how Facebook has a monopoly in anything or how a social networking monopoly even could exist. It’s a competitive market out there. Some of their competitors are on the DMA’s hit list too.
> What do you mean "neutral law on neutral principles" ? Does that exist ?
Sure it does. A law against murder is a law applied to everyone. That’s a neutral law, and it’s not targeted, and it’s a fairly neutral principle to state that “murder is intolerable in our society”.
> However, we just happen, in the EU, to have pretty strong memory of people doing bad things with extensive databases, so we have different views on the matter.
The bad people doing bad things with extensive databases were European governments.
Antitrust doesn't mean monopoly, but monopoly is a part of antitrust. Monopoly also doesn't mean you're the only one, but you're the one capable of fixing prices, or doing something else anti competitive.
It's a complex thing in practice, don't take the linguistic definition of the word itself as the sole interpretation of the law.
Please note not only what I wrote but what I was directly responding to when I wrote it.
> It's a complex thing in practice, don't take the linguistic definition of the word itself as the sole interpretation of the law.
I am aware; however I am still waiting for the solid argument that Facebook is a monopoly to be made in either an EU legal context (not “gatekeeper”, not “very large online platform”, monopoly) or an American legal context.
Facebook being a monopoly is irrelevant to EU competition laws. These laws are strictly interested in fostering competitive markets and broadly cares about all sorts of anticompetitive behaviours. They are in no way interested in monopolies and I don’t think being a monopoly is a prerequisite for any of them. The closest notion will be dominant position but that’s a far weaker criteria itself irrelevant to the DMA.
3 replies →
> I’ve been asking for years here and nobody has made a solid argument to me how Facebook has a monopoly in anything or how a social networking monopoly even could exist. It’s a competitive market out there. Some of their competitors are on the DMA’s hit list too.
This seems pretty convincing to me, given that Meta owns Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp: [1]
> Facebook leads the pack with 3.04 billion users, maintaining its position as the most extensive social networking site globally. > YouTube follows with 2.5 billion users, reinforcing its status as the premier platform for video sharing and consumption. > WhatsApp and Instagram are tied in the third position, each with 2 billion users. WhatsApp is renowned for its messaging services, while Instagram is a favorite for photo and video sharing. > TikTok, with 1.5 billion users, rounds out the top five, showcasing its rapid rise as a leading platform for short-form video content.
In terms of social media, the only "competitor" at the same scale as facebook is tiktok and snap.
We might leave in the bubble that uses twitter, bluesky, reddit, etc... but their small relative to the blue site, for better or for worse.
Break up Meta into differents, apps, and suddenly the monopoly becomes much less obvious.
> and it’s a fairly neutral principle to state that “murder is intolerable in our society”.
Do you mean it's "neutral" because there is no "arbitrage" in deciding if someone is a murderer ?
Or that the principle behind it is universal ?
In this case, is it still "neutral" once your start talking about, say, self defense ? death penalty ? assisted suicide ? war times ? (or, if you're going to stretch it a lot, abortion ?) I'm not bringing it to say there is an equivalence, I'm saying you _will_ have people making the equivalence, and different people will disagree. It's called principles - no law say they have to be universal, and they're usually not.
[1] https://prioridata.com/data/social-media-usage/#Social_Media...
> This seems pretty convincing to me, given that Meta owns Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp: [1]
>> Facebook leads the pack with 3.04 billion users, maintaining its position as the most extensive social networking site globally. > YouTube follows with 2.5 billion users, reinforcing its status as the premier platform for video sharing and consumption. > WhatsApp and Instagram are tied in the third position, each with 2 billion users. WhatsApp is renowned for its messaging services, while Instagram is a favorite for photo and video sharing. > TikTok, with 1.5 billion users, rounds out the top five, showcasing its rapid rise as a leading platform for short-form video content.
This tells only part of the story, believe it or not. You know the old phrase, lies, damned lies, and statistics? This is why statistics is on the list: statistics are a very easy way to mislead and even straight up lie to people.
So let’s start with your conception of the DMA: the DMA is not an anti-monopoly law. It is addendum to the EU’s competition policy, which defines a new entity type called a gatekeeper. Similarly, with the DSA (“Digital Services Act”) they defined another entity type: very large online platforms or VLOPs.
The reason why they were put in the position in the first place of writing new laws defining new entity types is because no matter how they tried to slice it, not even the EU could justifiably punish their targets, large mostly American tech giants, under anti-monopoly law, not even if they were to really stretch it by legally redefining what a monopoly even is.
Do you want to know what a monopoly looks like? It looks like AT&T in the 90s with long distance phone calls, where the only way to talk to someone across a long distance and hear their voice was to go through AT&T’s telephone lines that had long ago been laid coast-to-coast across the USA. It looks like railroads colluding because they’re all laying tracks across Kansas and they don’t want to do that anymore. That’s a monopoly.
Apple, Meta, et al. have not been charged as monopolies under the DMA or DSA. They have been defined, literally put on a list by the EC under a law it had written itself with specific targets in mind, as Gatekeepers and/or VLOPs and simply being on that list is enough to give the EC extra special authority over them, again, under the law it has written with them in mind.
So let’s go back to social networks and discuss whether Facebook is a monopoly. I’m going to assert no and here is why: Facebook does not control the free flow of information across society, provide a chokehold for communication, is not essential for communication, and is not essential in its form or function. The Blue App itself is actually a very old type of social network grounded in the early to mid-aughts with sites like MySpace and 1up.com as its peers. Some of the kids today that never grew up with that, but really only heard about it have found their home in this retro social network called SpaceHey, but you don’t really see more Facebook’s because nobody really wants that. There’s already Facebook.
What about Facebook’s suite? The Blue App, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Again, all very large social networks in their own right. There’s also Threads tied into Instagram. They only seem dominant if you ignore an incredibly important piece of information: people don’t use just one social network. They use several, and for different purposes and niches. Twitter/X, Reddit, WeChat, LINE, KakaoTalk, Blue Sky, WhatsApp, VSCO, Instagram, Snapchat, Discord, Mixi, iMessage, Badoo, Mastodon, TikTok & Douyin, Whisper, Yik Yak, VK, Xiaohongshu, Letterboxd, Truth Social and Bumble are all playing in the same space. I would even throw Hacker News in the mix. What differentiates them are things like niche, geography, audience or interest focus, and medium but there are only so many hours in the day and Facebook is competing against all of that, and Netflix and YouTube, and the time you spend IRL just chatting with your friends at the pub or whatever.
People are on Facebook at this point largely because they want to be, and the fact that they have 3 billion users or whatever is fucking irrelevant to a competition authority because there’s no country or bloc on Earth with that population. The United States Department of Justice is chiefly concerned with competition law inside its own borders, and the same for the relevant EU authorities, and the same for each other country on Earth.
> In this case, is it still "neutral" once your start talking about, say, self defense ? death penalty ? assisted suicide ? war times
Murder has a definition, and it’s not just a synonym for the killing of someone. It’s the unlawful and intentional act of killing someone without justification nor a valid excuse. Different legal systems may vary in the specifics, but most do tend to distinguish murder from other forms of killing. Either way, the applicability of the charge of murder, or the charge of being a monopoly to bring this discussion back a bit from the morbid, is founded in the rule of law.