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Becoming a Monopoly Was Always Facebook’s Goal
‘Copy, acquire, and kill’
Wednesday’s filing of a major government antitrust suit against Facebook is a landmark in the internet’s history. We knew the suit was coming; we didn’t know it would call for a full-on breakup that would split off Instagram and WhatsApp from the parent company. You can read the Federal Trade Commission’s 53-page complaint here.
Some commentators were quick to question how the FTC and 46 state attorneys general could credibly claim Facebook’s 2012 Instagram acquisition and 2014 WhatsApp acquisition constituted monopolistic behavior, given that the deals withstood antitrust scrutiny at the time. Indeed, both purchases were mocked by many as frivolous overpays, and few foresaw Instagram or WhatsApp growing into the giants that they’ve become under Facebook’s ownership.
That Facebook saw something others didn’t may be a testament to the company’s farsightedness and business acumen. But just because certain regulators and pundits didn’t recognize what Mark Zuckerberg was up to at the time doesn’t mean the company is innocent of anticompetitive behavior.
On the contrary, we now have evidence of what I and many others argued from the start: that Zuckerberg’s goal was always to monopolize social networking. Internal Facebook emails published as part of…
