This is also where a lot of it gets ticky tacky. The difference between being anti-competitive and acting competitively against a credible threat is often in the eye of the beholder.

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collinmcnulty 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Acting competitively is releasing a competing feature of your product (e.g. Reels vs TikTok). Anti-competitive is buying off the competition (buying Instagram). I don't see how this is a complicated definition.

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arlattimore 3 hours ago | parent [-]

There are plenty of acquisitions which I think are competitive, but the market conditions are the critical evaluation point.

Where this breaks down & this is something that the FTC needs to learn from the past (poor in retrospect) approvals and redress in the future is who the acquiring company is and how quickly they could bring something to scale which would stifle future competition.

When facebook acquired Instagram, it has ~900M MAUs and Instagram had ~30M MAUs (3-5M in just the last month or two before acquisition, accelerating very quickly). By facebook's own account their MAUs and growth rate was considered a threat, so they acquired them to remove the threat. Fast forward 14 years, Instagram has 3b MAUs and displacing them is going to be __very hard__.

If you were to apply that same retrospecitive lens to Google, they've been able to acquire Google Analytics, YouTube, DoubleClick, Android, Google Maps and others to take them to hyper scale, completely dominate a particular product space because of their existing massive user base.

Not an easy job for the FTC to get right, but (in my opinion), it is clear that the FTC have been acting on an incomplete understanding of how hyper scale companies operate, how they can influence a market with their user base etc.

	▲	AnthonyMouse 8 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> There are plenty of acquisitions which I think are competitive, but the market conditions are the critical evaluation point. There is an easy circumstance when an acquisition is never "competitive" -- when the takeover target is a healthy business and the acquiring company is a major incumbent in the same market. Conversely, something like Google buying Android isn't a merger problem. Google's market share in mobile phone operating systems at the time was essentially zero. They were buying it to get to market a little faster and it's very likely that if they'd built a new one instead of buying it, Android would have died and their thing would have ended up where Android is. Because it wasn't Android's technology that won. Take the median OS and then make it free by funding its development with Google's search engine revenue and also give it free advertising from the largest advertising company. The OS isn't the reason that became one of the two major mobile platforms. But the problem there not being the merger doesn't mean it's not a problem. It'd be the same problem if they'd developed it internally, because the problem is that it's "free" but it isn't. Anyone can "run Android" on their competing device but they can't then run their bank app because that requires attestation which requires Google. It's an antitrust problem that isn't a merger. Those are a thing too.

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SaltyBackendGuy 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Help me understand how acquiring them is acting competitively? There's always grey area for sure, but it's hard for me to understand how that would be good for a competitive market.

	▲	legitster 4 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Myspace didn't expand into new markets and got left behind. FB was legitimately worried they were going to be left behind too. There's an alternate reality where Facebook fell off, and Instagram never monetized and died like the dozen other competitors it had. If it was as easy as "industry consolidation is bad" we could write simple legislation to make it illegal for a company to buy another company - but there are too many counter-examples where the alternatives to acquisition is worse.
	▲	roenxi 4 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		In any market there are an appropriate number of sellers. If you think about it in terms of balance equations there have to be exactly as many sellers as there are buyers at a given price and any want-to-be sellers who aren't competitive at that price are eventually forced out of the market through bankruptcy because they can't sell and run out of reserves to hold on. There are no guarantees on how many sellers a market wants. Some markets it is thousands, some tens, some just 1. The number also fluctuates continuously in ways too complicated to model. Acquiring a competitor is acting competitively if the natural market number of sellers is N and there are currently N+1 sellers. Someone is going bust and it is better for the assets and whatnot to be reorganised quickly rather than waiting for bankruptcy to force everyone's hand and cause a disorderly change. A fun lens to look at Animat's comment upthread is that if the EU was trying to force more sellers than a software market can handle, then we'd expect them all to be weak and the EU might be unable to compete in software because they'd be too small.
	▲	limagnolia 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I simply don't see Instagram and Facebook as competitive products. You could look at the advertising side, but there are tons of advertising companies. Whatsapp is more directly competitive to Meta Messenger (though that product was pretty different when Meta acquired Whatsapp), but again, in the US, messaging apps are a dime a dozen. If we are looking solely at antitrust, there are a lot of companies- and a lot of tech companies- that are far worse than Meta.