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Facebook and Spotify share a number of investors: billionaire Li Ka Shing has a stake in Facebook and Spotify. Yuri Milner’s DST Global, which owns roughly 10% of Facebook, is also in negotiations to buy a stake in Spotify. Facebook’s founding president and Napster founder Sean Parker, sits on the board of Spotify.

http://benjamin.sonntag.fr/Moglen-at-Re-Publica-Freedom-of-t...




I don't understand this comment. Many companies share investors, especially at the level of Facebook and Spotify.

Are you trying to suggest that a mutual investor somehow has enough product control to strong-arm Facebook and Spotify into this?


I assume the parent post does - and so do I, in at least this particular case. Seeing how closly knit Facebook and Spotify are.

There's not just a shared investor group - there's also a partnership between the two companies. And it's pretty strong, as in; yes, it does seem like they have shared product control or at least great influences on each others product management

Mark Zuckerberg is listed and quoted as one of the references on their sign up page, by the way.


I would understand if the parent comment had noted everything in your second and third paragraphs about the strong partnership between product teams and Mark Zuckerberg's reference on the sign up page. That stuff seems incredibly relevant in this context.

If the intention was to paint the companies as working closely together, talk about how they actually work closely together, not about how the same VC firms at two different points in time happened to give them some money.


Are you suggesting that a mutual (or any) investor has no influence whatsoever?


At the level of implementation of individual features like what happens when a user logs in with an email address instead of a username, I am absolutely suggesting that the influence is so minimal as to be irrelevant.


I am not suggesting anything. Please listen to Eben's talk: it is much more serious than an "accidentally" entangled account.


To be clear I think this is very serious. There is a reason I deleted my Facebook account in 2009 and have never had a Spotify account.

But you were clearly trying to suggest that shared investors have something to do with this. There's no other information in your comment except that the two companies share investors. And in the context of this incident the only possible implication of your comment is that shared investors somehow influenced this. Otherwise why post the comment at all?




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