> “I didn’t mean to imply that we’d be buying them to prevent them from competing with us in any way,”
Isn't what matters in the end is whether there is still an effective market left as a result?
It seems that Mark himself is arguing that by the nature of the network effects of social media, first movers have a natural monopoly advantage that's hard to break.
The regulators should be focusing on that - ie enforcing rules which limit the monopoly advantage due to network effects.
Take the telecomms space - if somebody got first mover on a phone system and it wasn't interoperable with any others - then once established they would have a monopoly. The way you break that is to force interoperability - not allow companies to use access to the network as a competition barrier.
An example in the Meta space - as far as I can tell it was not possible for me to send a message to somebody in Whatsapp without going via whatsapp - ie there is no network access from a different app.
This appears to be exactly what the EU is focussed on - enforcing interop.
Isn't what matters in the end is whether there is still an effective market left as a result?
It seems that Mark himself is arguing that by the nature of the network effects of social media, first movers have a natural monopoly advantage that's hard to break.
The regulators should be focusing on that - ie enforcing rules which limit the monopoly advantage due to network effects.
Take the telecomms space - if somebody got first mover on a phone system and it wasn't interoperable with any others - then once established they would have a monopoly. The way you break that is to force interoperability - not allow companies to use access to the network as a competition barrier.
An example in the Meta space - as far as I can tell it was not possible for me to send a message to somebody in Whatsapp without going via whatsapp - ie there is no network access from a different app.
This appears to be exactly what the EU is focussed on - enforcing interop.
https://engineering.fb.com/2024/03/06/security/whatsapp-mess... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Markets_Act