Domestic data hoarders and advertisers - extremely invasive and territorial. The difference is that none of them runs social networking website or mobile messenger app, thus without consumer facing facade many uninformed assume they don't exist. e.g. their media and retail oligopolies like to roll out their own ad, tracking, and loyalty programs to have full control of the data. They don't let anyone in and are trying to expand, clumsily, to other EU countries.

What does "other data collectors exist" have to do with Facebook's status as the dominating social network (95% (measuring DAUs)/80% (measuring MAUs) market share according to the press release)? Facebook also clearly cites other social media companies/networks from a wider scope in defense, not data collectors.

there are other relevant collectors as well for example Deutsche Post (German Postal Services), see https://www.dw.com/en/deutsche-post-sold-voter-microtargetin...

It seems by "competition", they don't mean a competing social network, they mean competition for advertising pesos.

Think of FB as an oil company, whose product is human attention, instead of oil. The social network is the oil extraction technology, that is used to mine people’s data and attention. However, the actual product is this data and attention, which is then sold to advertisers, who are the real customers.

The social media extraction technology could be replaced by other tefhnologies used to mine data and attention, such as videos, music, or chat services. The competitors, however, are other companies selling the same product.

That is FB’s perspective.

Care to provide some details? because FB considers YouTube, Twitter, and the likes as that competition but you may know more.

Americans are smarter - they provide this bait-facade of "usefulness", Germans are more direct and down-to-the-business e.g. there are billboards on the streets of German cities with "privacy campaigns" actively agitating against Facebook, country-wide hysteria against social networks (or even internet in general). Someone certainly pays for it - articles, billboards, etc are not a volunteer work.

> there are billboards on the streets of German cities with "privacy campaigns" actively agitating against Facebook

I don't recall ever seeing anything like that. So it's either very rare or limited to certain regions. I do recall seeing Facebook billboards which pick up some of the Anti-Facebook rhetoric, e.g. [1]. Those are paid for by Facebook.

> country-wide hysteria against social networks

According to Facebook itself, there are ~29 million daily users[2] in Germany (pop. 82 million).

[1] http://cdn4.spiegel.de/images/image-1065027-galleryV9-qxvz-1... ("I posted something I should not have shared/Delete it and it's gone")

[2] https://allfacebook.de/zahlen_fakten/offiziell-facebook-nutz...

I'm sure someone must pay. But I can make assumptions all by myself with little to no help. What I could really use are details, facts, evidence. So I'm forced to reiterate, care to provide some?

I don't mean evidence that people want more privacy and someone is paying/putting up billboards advocating this. Do you have some evidence (anything) that these yet unnamed companies are behind a strategy to stain FB's image (as if it were needed) in order to have the privacy violation market all to the themselves?

Can you at least name one of these companies? Or maybe a hint on why Facebook doesn't even acknowledge this enemy?

An example from the street of a major German city: https://i.imgur.com/owlT9Rv.jpg

I have absolutely no insight into any lobbying activities, obviously.

That doesn't really feel like an anti-FB campaign as much as a campaign to improve the FB experience and an "educational" one to raise awareness related to fake accounts. You can tell as much by their FB page.

That billboard was made by Facebook themselves though, in an attempt to "educate" users on privacy, in a feeble attempt to appear responsible.

> articles, billboards, etc are not a volunteer work.

Are you sure? It's unusual but not impossible. It ought to be possible to find out who is paying for them.

Facebook's response is without question following Peter Thiel's monopolist argumentation position.

If you're a monopolist, widen your pool of competition to include anything you possibly can.

If your employees consume fruit at work, proclaim you're competing with Chiquita bananas (and have a tiny share of the fruit market).

If your employees ever fly on planes, proclaim your position in jets is terribly weak next to Boeing and Airbus.

They're not a social network, they're considerably trailing YouTube with Watch. They're not a social network, they're trailing Craigslist with Marketplace. They're not a social network, they're badly trailing Android and iOS in app marketplaces. They're not a social network, they're badly trailing Amazon and Google in smart speakers and home tech. And so on the lie goes.

Does this argument really work? Nobody says that Facebook has a monpoly in everything they do. They say that they have a monopoly in a very specific area, which should be enough for antritrust lawsuits.

I'm pretty sure that AT&T and Standard Oil also had branches that did not have a monopoly in their respective areas, but that didn't stop the splitting of the companies.

Microsoft aggressively deployed it in the 1990s with the US Government. It didn't work at all ultimately. Nobody outside of Microsoft's management bought into the premise (they either didn't actually buy into it either, or they were wildly delusional, hard to tell which it really was). Once the DOJ took the Microsoft case seriously, they cut through Microsoft's fluff like a buzzsaw.

It doesn't work very well at all with a determined government, which will zero in on specific market abuses (rather than getting caught up in bullshit PR fluff). Primarily it's one part PR play with the public brand & image, and one part time delay. Facebook would love nothing more than to have an opportunity to burn years of time by being given a chance to argue round and round about all the competition they face.

Microsoft laughably couldn't stop repeating how they were fighting for their right to innovate (which eg had next to nothing to do with their serious OEM abuses). Every other word out of Gates and Ballmer's mouths for years was a variation of innovation. They beat that drum to death, it made no difference. They tried playing the widen the competition pool card over and over again, that also made zero difference.

No serious regulator will ever believe the competition everywhere premise. I generally don't believe it's aimed at actually convincing a serious regulator, either. The sharks that work for giants like Facebook know it's not an actual strong legal argument, which is why I believe it's one part stall tactic and one part public image support. There's a small chance it could cause some skepticism among less determined regulators as a fluke benefit.

The only thing I would add is that it serves as a convenient figleaf for regulators and policy advocates who are politically or ideologically friendly to monopolists, of whom there are no shortage in the US at least

The other part of Peter Thiel's point is that if you aren't a monopoly, you pretend you are, so you can convince investors you are much more valuable.

Well, that statement is essentially a strawman. Even IF Facebook does face competition - it doesn't mean they should be allowed to violate privacy.

Not under anti-trust law (German "Kartellrecht"), where market concentration and competition are primary factors.

They named Youtube, Snapchat and Twitter as their competition

I think most companies internally think of anything that takes a user away from their service or site, even unrelated as competition.

Fortnite is the bogeyman for all entertainment and so forth.

But yeah as for social network, nothing.

BND seems like it could compete with facebook