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A comment on Meta antitrust trial kicks off in federal court. Parent comment

Re:Meta antitrust trial kicks off in federal court by stackskipton on Monday April 14, 2025 @07:43PM (#43687485)
Facebook knew that Instagram was up and coming and instead of competing, it just bought it.

You can read more about initial complaint and following the trial here: https://www.bigtechontrial.com/p/zuckerberg-on-the-stand-the...

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Re:Meta antitrust trial kicks off in federal court by DecentShoes on Monday April 14, 2025 @11:19PM (#43688698)
Isn't this the purpose of most acquisitions?
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Re:Meta antitrust trial kicks off in federal court by callc on Monday April 14, 2025 @11:43PM (#43688790)
If the purpose of an acquisition is to quash competition that is bad. Monopolies are bad.

Another purpose of acquisitions is to acquire a new capability that you could not do in house that you do not already compete on.

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Re:Meta antitrust trial kicks off in federal court by dmix on Monday April 14, 2025 @11:51PM (#43688825)
Instagram was and still is in a highly competitive market. Previously it was Snapchat at the time and now it's Tiktok. Not to mention YouTube shorts, Reddit, Twitter, and every other service focused on video and pictures.

I don't think any social media consumer is lacking choice.

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Re:Meta antitrust trial kicks off in federal court by callc on Tuesday April 15, 2025 @12:40AM (#43689038)
Regardless of how much “choice” there is in a market, FB made an anti-competitive play. Now we all have n-1 choices.

The question of whether society should allow companies to perform anti-competitive actions should not be “will we be left with enough choices?”, but should be “is this an anti-competitive action?”

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Re:Meta antitrust trial kicks off in federal court by reaperducer on Tuesday April 15, 2025 @09:46AM (#43692631)
Isn't this the purpose of most acquisitions?

No, it's not. It is not normal or usual. Not even in the tech industry.

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Re:Meta antitrust trial kicks off in federal court by blululu on Tuesday April 15, 2025 @10:12AM (#43692984)
A true accounting of board level corporate motivations is not available. The standard line is typically something like “we are acquiring our smaller rival to more effectively compete with our larger rival”. I.e “we are acquiring a small desktop publishing start up to compete with the largest cloud computing provider”. Or in this case: “we are acquiring a small photo sharing company to compete against Google/Youtube”.
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Re:Meta antitrust trial kicks off in federal court by the_clarence on Tuesday April 15, 2025 @12:41PM (#43695321)
Are we talking past each other? How is that anti competitive? This is literally the opposite: they embraced and validated their competitor by making them a huge offer, showing that it pays off to compete
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Re:Meta antitrust trial kicks off in federal court by AnimalMuppet on Tuesday April 15, 2025 @12:49PM (#43695422)
And once they bought them, then Instagram wasn't a competitor any more. That's how it's anti-competitive.
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Re:Meta antitrust trial kicks off in federal court by the_clarence on Thursday April 17, 2025 @01:24AM (#43713378)
I disagree that it is anti competitive, it is not "killing" competition. Killing competition is setting prices that makes the competition go bankrupt, it's assassinating people, it's pushing for changes that prevent the competition from working in the same environment, etc. here nothing prevented instagram from saying no and getting bigger.
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