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.

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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.