Everything you need to know from the tech antitrust hearing (theverge.com).
With the big tech congressional hearing seeing the “four horsemen” of Silicon Valley—the CEOs of Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon—having to defend there company practices via videolink, and after Amazon’s Jeff Bezos seemingly tried his luck at appearing as a bit of a techno-klutz (dailymail.co.uk) and Apple’s Tim Cook made competition between them sound like the gangs fight in West Side Story (macrumors.com), it’s internal Facebook emails regards Instagram acquisition that formed the biggest bombshell:
Facebook bought Instagram to neutralize a competitor, emails show (buzzfeednews.com).
When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was considering buying Instagram in 2012, he told his company’s CFO [Chief financial officer] that it would neutralize a competitor, according to emails obtained by the House Antitrust Subcommittee and released Wednesday.
Ouch! And with nawty Zuck’s main platform struck by ad revenue boycotts and a general #deletefacebook lack of appetite from the hip n’ cool and non-middle aged, it should surprise none that both cooler purchased cousins Instagram and WhatsApp now have to stomach “from Fidiotbook” appended to their title.
And so…. Will the tech titans be pulled apart? Or will, like Microsoft when it faced its antitrust trial (Wikipedia) and indeed found to constituted a monopoly with a breakup of the company was ordered as remedy, a fairer-sharing settlement with not only smaller tech but with users serving as data product be negotiated?
A historic antitrust hearing in Congress has put big tech on notice (theguardian.com).
The House antitrust subcommittee must find a way to restore traditional antitrust regulation, while also addressing the new challenges posed by tech giants. When a company operates an ecosystem, what should be the limits on behavior? What rules should govern corporations that build a business around personal data?
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