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Du numerous complaints about Facebook, agrees consistently: It’s too big. That’s why some critics and regulators want to downsize by forcing Mark Zuckerberg to undo big purchases, like Instagram.
Zuckerberg’s answer: Let’s grow by buying more things.
After a brief slowdown in 2018, the year the Cambridge Analytica scandal erupted, Facebook is constantly making big purchases – at least 21 in the last three years, per Pitchbook data service.
Many of the agreements have been announced since December 2020, when the U.S. government first filed an illegal lawsuit against the company, alleging maintaining an illegal monopoly on social media, buying or crushing competitors. Original suit and a revised complaint They aim to force Facebook to sell from Instagram and WhatsApp.
Over the last two years, there has been a widespread desire to get offers on Facebook Giphy, allows you to put funny GIFs on your social media posts client, A business software company for Facebook’s corporate clients. Most, however, come together in one area: games and virtual reality. This makes sense, as Zuckerberg formally announced, as games and virtual reality are wrapped up in a broad rubric that is difficult to define.metaverse, ”Are the future of Facebook.
That’s why the company name Meta has been changed. But more importantly, Facebook will bring its thousands of employees to the effort and plans to lose $ 10 trillion this year alone, and much more. ”for the coming years”.
Facebook announced the name change and the next day, the company explained how it will spend some of that money: a Bargain to buy inside, The company was founded by VR pioneer Chris Milk, known for himself Supernatural training application. People who know the transaction say Facebook paid more than $ 500 million for the company.
There are other Metaverse-y offerings announced this year Unit 2 Games, which makes it a “collaborative platform for creating games” Crayta; Bigbox VR, Which makes Facebook a popular game for Oculus VR glasses; and Downpour Interactive, A VR game creator.
Those were the deals already raising his eyebrows Before Facebook announced that it represented the company’s future. So what should we think about now?
That is, if you think that in 2021 Facebook needs to be broken, in part to dismantle past deals to dismantle deals like Instagram ($ 1 trillion, 2012) and WhatsApp ($ 19 billion, 2014), then you shouldn’t even worry about Zuckerberg deals. is he now building his company’s 2031 version?
A Facebook representative happily explained the difference to me: unlike a decade ago on social media, Facebook is not a leader in virtual reality / augmented reality / choosing a name: many large, capitalized companies spend a lot. time and money in it. And, as he warns, Zuckerberg imagines the future, where Facebook will simply be one of several metabersion companies.
Here is the statement of the record that explains the company’s Recoderi thesis:
“The key to success is investing and building in the products that consumers want. We cannot build a metaverse alone; collaboration with developers, creators and experts will be key. As we invest in metaberse, we know that in every step of this journey we face stiff competition from Microsoft, Google, Apple, Snap, Sony, Roblox, Epic and many other companies. ”
Translation: In the short term, it’s Facebook happy that Snap continues to try to sell sunglasses take videos and communicate with your phone because they are theoretical competitors Facebook sunglasses take videos and communicate with your phone. And Facebook will also be happy next year, when Apple will present its virtual reality headphones, Because Facebook will compete with Oculus headphones.
But it’s hard to imagine Facebook expecting Apple, Snap and all the others to be strong competitors forever. One of the main reasons Zuckerberg is interested in the metaverse is that he ultimately imagines that he can provide a way to connect directly with his customers without having to depend on the phone duopoly of Apple and Google.
Shopping on Facebook also highlights the difficulty of anti-competitive regulators in dealing with a fast-moving and unpredictable industry. Even the most aggressive anti-competitive measures we have seen in recent years are designed to go back in time and fix alleged errors.
Or they are focused on the present, like a bill which would prevent big platforms like Facebook from doing big business in their industries Nowadays dominate.
So how do you look to the future and guess that Facebook – not Google or Epic Games or Roblox or a startup you’ve never heard of – will dominate the metaverse? Especially when the metaverse doesn’t exist, maybe it never exists, or when it could have been in a very different way than Zuckerberg, science fiction writers, and technology makers, and investors can imagine today?
I asked the Federal Trade Commission, which is currently suing the agency for Facebook for its Instagram and WhatsApp deals, what they think about Facebook’s intentions and purchases from the Facebook metaverse, but I don’t expect to hear it, partly because the agency doesn’t want it. While talking about Facebook is a long struggle with Facebook, but also because he probably doesn’t know what he’s thinking.
It is important to note here that the government does not have to win a lawsuit or pass a law to slow down or stop Facebook’s intentions. Some tech investors I’ve talked to believe that Facebook is out of the market for social media-related shopping — at least for a while — because there’s too much analysis and hassle.
“I think Facebook will be very difficult to get anything in particular in the social space,” says a venture investor who sold Facebook to the company in the past.
And this may apply not only to large card purchases, but also to small “acquisitions” – agreements made by companies to include their engineers and other employees on their Facebook payroll.
Washington has already stated that it wants to pay more attention to small deals: in September, The FTC has released an analysis Of the 616 transactions made by Facebook, Google and other large technology companies in the last decade, which were not enough to trigger regulatory oversight.
But the existence of the report makes it clear that regulators believe they should look at more agreements, not less. FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter said even more clearly, “I think of serial shopping as a Pac-Man strategy.” he said when the report was released. “Every individual merger seen independently doesn’t seem to have much of an impact, but the collective impact of hundreds of small purchases can lead to monopolistic behavior.”
You can discuss whether Facebook has a monopoly on social media today – the company is happy to point out the success of TikTok overnight, arguing that it doesn’t. But there is no doubt about his immense wealth and power. The real question is: will we let him use these resources to expand his power in the future?
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