Interestingly, I remember Google's employee training[1] was written to warn against stuff this, something to the effect of:

"Hey, don't leave a papertrail about 'crushing' or 'destroying' competitors. We do not seek to monopolize markets and run afoul of antitrust laws. Instead, talk about how your product can better satisfy users and meet a demand."

(Another common theme I remember was that you shouldn't route stuff through Switzerland to get around export controls.)

[1] I contracted there via a startup.

Google's guidance for this stuff was always in the form of "don't leave a trail", not "don't do it in the first place".

Sketchy stuff comes up on a list? "Let's take it offline", not "no, stop this now".

That kind of thing. It was systemic.

This verbiage is common at most large multinats, from my own experience and from what's been relayed to me by peers.

I never heard it at Microsoft, nor was there training about avoiding paper trails.

I was inducted within the last three years, and I remember specific recommendations by CELA to have a non-content-based email deletion policy and to never insinuate anticompetitive behavior in an email or on teams.

The implication was "don't do anticompetitive behavior, we don't need to", but the warnings were given.

Depends who you were discussing it with. In general, if it was a manager, executive, or lawyer hired post-IPO, it'd be "Let's take this offline." Pre-IPO engineer, SRE, or UX designer of any tenure and it'd be "We shouldn't be doing this."

What they probably don’t realize is the record of saying “lets take it off line” ie requesting change in communication media is suspicious in itself and much easier for humans or algorithms to find in discovery than whatever complicated scheme they were going to discuss that wouldn’t give good target keywords.

I don't know, it seems like it's probably better to take it offline than to have a whole argument about something that shouldn't be talked about in the first place. If you keep talking, they are just going to put more dubious speculation on the record.

Shutting this down is just good management.

A lot of laws are written so that you have to prove intent (for good reason) and often let’s take this offline doesn’t satisfy that requirement. There are plenty of reasons to discuss something in another forum without any intent to break any laws.

A growing company is mutually exclusive with a company that tells their employees to "not create things that will crush or destroy competitors in the first place."

Even so, I still saw my Google manager's emails in the Oracle trial: http://www.fosspatents.com/2016/05/heres-mountain-of-willful...

A quick search for the word Facebook on that website reveals an uncomfortably pro-Facebook and anti-Google stance, couched amidst lots and lots of other stuff so the pattern cannot be discerned unless someone actually does a search. If the author is truly neutral as he claims, Facebook must be a saint when it comes to patent applications, which would be completely out of character. Or the author may be sponsored by a Google competitor who just happens to be pro-Facebook. Hmm... I wonder who that company might be.

Not that it makes Google's actions any better. But nowadays I doubt every single self proclaimed independent entity.

Yeah, Wall Street has much more experience in this. Whenever there would be something illegal to discuss, there’d be a phone call between our personal cell phones (company lines were recorded).

I've known a few CEOs of publicly traded companies, and they seem to have a "trap phone" with a rolodex of all the people they're not supposed to be talking to. Such as CEOs of direct competitors who they totally don't call to coordinate market strategy.

Also the most common 5 words heard on police scanners these days. ("Call me on my cell.")

These people should be in a cell.

Yeah really cops should not be using personal cell phones on duty. Don't know why this is allowed. Everything should be sent thru police radio and recorded.

Police IT is beyond awful. All of the cool toys are grant funded, so they build lots of stuff and maintain nothing. Operational funding is nonexistent.

The camera a detective I know was issued was a Canon Elph from 2003. They all use personal smartphones because the institutional equipment is limited and junky.

A surprisingly large number of people in the libor scandal were doing it openly in Bloomberg chat.

While true companies don't want to leave this kind of trail of actions, whether its in written form or not, ephemeral or recorded, people will have these kinds of communication. It's not like they should just ignore the competition or act via implicit understanding and winks and nods (they are not covered by anti-collusion like airline pricing is)

It's not surprising that big corporations are doing this kind of stuff. Their existence now relies not on productivity and efficiency but merely on raising the barrier to entry for competitors.

Corporations have already maxed out their capacity in terms of production efficiency; it's just really hard for them to coordinate so many employees efficiently. If coordinating large numbers of people was easy (and didn't become exponentially harder relative to number of people), we'd probably all be wealthy communists.

Instead of focusing on how to do their own job better, corporations have shifted their focus towards how to make it harder for competitors to do theirs.

This seems extremely reasonable to me.

Vine was launched in January 2013. Back then FB and Twitter were significantly more competitive than they are now.

Twitter must have been terrifying to Facebook. Of course they would shut down their API access for Vine. It's a no brainer.

The point of building a platform is to create more value for your users, your partners, and your own business. Not to make it easier for your competition to catch up...

It's not unreasonable when you consider this in terms anticompetitiveness and related laws.

Imagine if Microsoft just came along one day and literally banned any office software, including LibreOffice etc. from running on it's OSs.

Imagine if Nissan bought up a bunch of gas chains in the US and refused to sell gas to ... to let's say ... GM cars.

Or the electric company, which had invested in some solar panel outlays, decided to ban all other 3rd party solar panels from the grid.

These things are always a little fuzzy, but they are real.

Also - the lack of user clear consent is another one ie telling users that apps 'cannot extract their data' but in reality, they are selling it to Netflix.

FB can legitimately explain a way a lot of issues lately, but this one is bad. I think it's far worse than the Cambridge Analytica scandal in which case they weren't really doing anything wrong, just late to maybe close off said APIs.

The difference is that the Windows and Office are (or were) stand alone products that used no MS resources after the sale.

A free online service running on hardware you don't control isn't obligated to provide free service for everyone indefinitely. Same as "No shirt, no shoes, no service". A proprietor can refuse dealings with toxic customers.

Key difference:

- "No shirt, no shoes, no service" is a rule that applies to all customers, same with blocking customers that develop toxic behavior.

- Specifically targeting and dropping service for someone who launched a different competing service, for that reason, is anti-competitive.

I don't think that is anti-competitive under the legal[1] interpretation, but I could be wrong. My understanding of the legal precedent here is that a company is allowed to disallow service for any reason whatsoever as long as there is no contract in place. The only time it becomes anticompetitive is if a product prevents users or customers from being able to access the competing product.

The example I'm thinking of is Microsoft with Internet Explorer, where users were unable to use a browser of their choice. Here a company is not being allowed to use an API, but users are not prevented from using the product if they'd like. They just won't get all the functionality of Facebook within that company's product.

Facebook's behavior seems more comparable to Apple disallowing use of privileged iOS APIs in competing mobile browsers rather than Microsoft not allowing users to install competing browsers. But I'm not an expert on monopolies, so I'm happy to be corrected here.

__________________________

1. NB - I'm not making a claim or observation about ethics or what ought to be, I'm asking about what is, legally.

From [1] "Price discrimination is made illegal under the Sherman Antitrust Act. 15 U.S.C. §2, the Clayton Act, 15 U.S.C. §13, and by the Robinson-Patman Act, 15 U.S.C. §§13-13b, 21a, when engaged in for the purpose of lessening competition, such as tying the lower prices to the purchase of other goods or services."

I'd gather that the same might apply to sale/no sale and not just prices, i.e. you can't not sell something to someone purely for competitive reasons, there has to be 'some reason'.

[1] https://definitions.uslegal.com/p/price-discrimination/

Full disclosure: I'm definitely not a lawyer.

That stuff was reinterpretated in the 70/80s. If it doesn’t raise cost to the public, it’s not a problem.

Not in the UK or EU - you don't need to have market dominance to be fined for anti-competitive behavior.

We're not talking about 'toxic customers' who don't obey universal rules.

So that's not a good example.

We're talking about a store arbitrarily discriminating between customers on terms of it's own choosing.

... which is what makes it harder.

As for your 'software sold after the fact' ... welcome to iOS / AppStore to see who 'controls' what :)

I think vine situation is a bit different then this examples.

First of all, let's see the facts.

- Sharing user's friendship data with all applications was wrong decision. There were a lot of bad actors. - So Facebook decided to stop this practice. But in the process some good actors are also burned, so they implemented some system to share some limited data considering:

- You have some critical mass of users - sign a special agreement to promise you will not use this data in a bad way - if having not access to this friendship data breaking your app's model - and probably your app is not competing with facebook's business model

so twitter came, agreed on this terms, got whitelisted. Then probably stepped over fb's toe with vine, and facebook revoked their access.

The thing is facebook didn't remove because it was competitive, they didn't allow competitive in the first place. This is not different from Apple not allowing another browser engines, or another app stores in their ecosystem.

Facebooks decision to whitelist was entirely 'inner circle' and strategic.

It was not an open, rules-based scenario.

For example, there's no reason that 'Vine' did anything to breach the 'good actor' scenario - FB banned them for competitive reasons.

'Bumble' got special access because FB is an investor. (Did OkCupid? Tinder?)

Moroever, it seems that users were not properly notified of the 'good actors use' of their data.

Actually in the document published, it is pretty clear. Reciprocity part is explaining clearly. (especially strategic competitors)

The key point is 'equitable value exchange'.

If I am building a social network, leaching user/data from facebook, it is different than creating an app inside facebook ecosystem. This is the main distinction I guess.

> 'Bumble' got special access because FB is an investor. (Did OkCupid? Tinder?)

I think you misread the article. Facebook wasn't an investor in Bumble. Badoo was an investor in Bumble along with owning other dating services which were whitelisted. Facebook was also not (that I can find online) an investor in Badoo.

tbh I don't know any special access bumble got, from outside tinder and bumble doesn't look much different on facebook usage.

I worked in a city department with an obscene full service Microsoft contract and running any Linux machines on the same network was a violation of the TOS and therefor not allowed or considered even when obviously appropriate.

In the US? More likely the IT leadership interpreted it incorrectly... they define Linux devices as in scope for your enrollment. That was the big problem when Novell tried to pitch desktop Linux... you’d pay twice.

Cali 14 years ago, county zoning office.

lol, is totally not the same, as far as I know FB never blocked Vine from having a page or anything like that.

Dropping a service, which is typically open to the public, to a competitor solely because they're a competitor is considered anti-competitive.

It's one of the reasons Amazon won't admit to dropping AppleTV and Chromecast from their entire store because the products compete with their Firestick. Instead Amazon says that users are confused when trying to buy their firestick, so they're blocking even the third party sellers from listing it. Note that Amazon allows thousands of competing goods to sell in their store that users can equally get confused about.

Facebook kind of screwed up here, since the EU/UK does not require a company to be market-dominant to be eligible for anti-competitive fines.

> The point of building a platform is to create more value for your users

Sure, from a competitive perspective, that makes perfect sense. However, FB is at this point a global surveillance operation aimed at inserting itself as an essential utility in everyone's life, with the only apparent limit on their intel collection being fear of bad PR.

If you don't have enough sense to stop playing chicken with gray-areas[1] when you're big enough that playing rough can hurt those outside of the game, then you deserve to be regulated, if not attacked by regulators and sued until it really, seriously hurts, maybe kills.

I mean, what do you call it when a tech company puts serious energy and effort into hiding that they're harvesting text messages and phone calls from Android users incautious enough to trust them? Facebook is the world's largest malware infestation to date.

[1] To be exceedingly generous to a firm as slimy and invasive as FB.

That's the sort of thing that got Microsoft deemed an abusive monopoly, isn't it? Handicapping APIs when used by competitors?

Cutting off API access is destroying value to preserve market power. Quite analogous to what Standard Oil did with their railways.

Great example. For posterity, You need to explain the standard oil example more. I don’t think many people know about the story of standard oil gaining a monopoly in oil through transportation.

We have specific laws (called the anti-trust laws) to prevent monopolies in an industry from leveraging their power in an anti-competitive way. Or at least we used to, it's questionable whether America is still a nation of laws.

This is what a monopoly looks like.

Careful, we don't want to start using the word Monopoly wrongly.

When real monopolies exist and are dangerous, we need to be able to tell them apart.

Maybe you can try to explain why, but Adamm Smith who defined the concept of Monopoly would disagree with you. The purpose of the government is to stop firms ever being able to create one.This means before a monopoly is created.

Facebook is unquestionably a monopoly. They have unquestionably engaged in illegal anti-competitive behavior. It isn't even subtle.

In what way?

* Monopolistic action

Facebook is still far from the textbook definition of monopoly, but this anti-competitive behavior is not good.

quacking like a monopoly

acting with the knowledge that they can stem the growth of a competitor and flipping the switch

I believe OP mens abusing market power to prevent competition.

Although if it is or not a monopoly and an abuse of market power is dubious, but it clearly is anti-competitive.

This is similar to Amazon shutting off Google Products from any retailers using its platform. It is anti-competitive, but the jury is out on whether it is abusing market power.

TL;DR: you can try to shut off your competitors from the market, as long as you're not abusing your market power to do so.

PS: The Hacker News definition of monopoly has nothing to do with the economics, policy and antitrust definition of monopoly.

How is it anticompetitive to stop sharing data you own with another business who has taken a more competitive stance against you? It’s not like Facebook is a public service that everyone is entitled to. And I say that as someone who deleted his own account long ago. I dislike Facebook for a lot of reasons but this isn’t one of them.

It is retaliation for another business competing with you. That is literally using your market power to try to reduce competition.

But taking anti-competitive actions by itself isn't necessarily an issue, but it is a problem if you're deemed to have significant market power in a defined market.

Essentially: if Facebook is deemed to have significant market power, this could be a problem, if it doesn't have, then it isn't a problem.

Anti-trust relies heavily on the precise definition of a market (which is a subject that Hacker News comments generally ignore when crying wolf, I mean, monopoly).

I don't think its anti-competitive considering they don't need to provide any third party APIs at all. Plus it's not like to create a social app you absolutely need FB login or FB data. I think if your company can't make it and you're blaming FB for not giving you enough data maybe your business model was a little too dependent on Facebook in the first place.

> I don't think its anti-competitive considering they don't need to provide any third party APIs at all.

Removing the access of a competitor in retaliation for them competing with you, when you give it to other players is anti-competitive by definition.

This seems like retaliation for Twitter blocking Instagram from using its API (after Facebook recently acquired Instagram in 2012).

(Source: https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/26/3189340/twitter-blocks-in...)

Facebook had blocked Twitter from accessing their API in 2010.

Did Twitter shut down everyone's access to that API, or just Facebook's?

They had blocked Twitter itself from searching for friends on Facebook in 2010:

https://www.adweek.com/digital/twitter-facebook-friends/

I'm thinking about this in light of the IRA troll activity on FB & twitter during the '16 elections. They were pretty comical at times yet they seemed to fool enough people. I think it would have been near impossible for people in Saint Petersburg to fool almost anyone with short videos instead. Shame that vine was crushed.

I get it. they are the 400# gorilla and when they act competitively like this, it looks bad. However, for most competitive organizations, this would be standard procedure. You see an upstart which is using what sets you apart from others (their social graph) to compete against you, you take actions. I don't see anything extraordinary about this exchange.

The data collection and selling --that's what people should be upset about and lobby against. This kind of thing is a sideshow and will only interest the most hard-core anti-FB people. To get regular folks on board with changing the culture around user data, talk about user data and privacy, concentrate on that.

Zuckerberg said Facebook was about connecting the world. This looks like its about walling off the world?

Ok? So? We have all pivoted, changed minds and made changes because of external inputs. Maybe he had bad motives (get everyone hooked and then dump the suckers) but it's still competitive measures. It's not even illegal like dumping scooters and bikes all over a city.

How does it benefit the public to allow this kind of competition? Corporate competition exist to serve the public, and when it doesn't, we may as well make rules to force it to. Competition isn't an intrinsic good.