Tuesday, August 6, 2019

Facebook Antitrust: Restraint of Trade (FB)

We've mentioned a few times that Google and in particular Facebook are susceptible to old-school antitrust analysis because of their use of the John D. Rockefeller "Buy 'em, Copy 'em, or Crush 'em" approach to competition:
August 1
"FTC probes Facebook's acquisition practices - WSJ" (FB)
which links back to some earlier posts, see (waaay) below.
For the moment this link is a placeholder but I'm pretty sure we'll be refering back to it.

From Techwyse, June 17, 2019

72 Facebook Acquisitions – The Complete List (2019)!
[INFOGRAPHIC]
By Ramzeen A V
Facebook or should we say, “The Facebook,” was created by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004. Initially created solely for college students attending specific schools, Facebook reached one million users in just 10 short months after its inception. Fourteen years later in 2019, Facebook has nearly 2 billion users! And this doesn’t include its other properties like WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger just to name a few.

During this wave of extreme growth, Mark Zuckerberg has acquired 72 companies till date. Facebook’s largest acquisition so far has been WhatsApp Messenger, which they purchased for $19 billion in February 2015. Other notable acquisitions include Instagram ($1 billion in April 2012) and Oculus Virtual Reality ($2 billion in March 2014)....MUCH MORE
Techwyse home

Facebook Acquisitions - companies acquired by Facebook


July 23
U.S. DOJ Antitrust Division "Reviewing the Practices of Market-Leading Online Platforms" ( FB; GOOG; AMZN; AAPL)  
The symbols in the headline are in rank order of probable exposure to old-school antitrust sanctions. Twitter if it were included would appear in the middle. 
Facebook and Google have an especially egregious pattern of acquiring, crushing or copying nascent competition, the type of behavior most amenable to classical antitrust analysis. See:
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