
Facebook charged with misleading EU on $22B WhatsApp merger - bndr
http://arstechnica.co.uk/tech-policy/2016/12/facebook-whatsapp-european-commission-charges-misleading-merger-claim/
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alaaf
> the free content ad network failed to disclose

Interesting they don’t call it a ‘social network’. ‘content ad network’ is
more accurate in my opinion.

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robert_foss
Maybe we should adopt the term? "Content ad network" does have a certain ring
to it.

~~~
gooseus
I concur, even before there was widespread corporate advertising my impression
of "social networking" was that it was more about advertising your personal
activities and beliefs to your network than actually socializing within it.

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solotronics
social advertising

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mkaziz
I wish the US had laws like the EU that protected the consumer.

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oever
It only works when the laws are upheld. Facebook is a non-EU company, so their
actions are purely a problem for the people locked to Facebook, not for the
European economy.

The emissions excesses of diesel cars first discovered on Volkswagen were
fined in the USA. Volkswagen is a non-USA company. The EU is still not taking
action on the emissions because it is feared that that would impact the bottom
line of the European car industry which is apparently more important than the
health of the constituency.

[http://gerbrandy.eu/dieselgate-report-co-rapporteur-
gerbrand...](http://gerbrandy.eu/dieselgate-report-co-rapporteur-gerbrandy-
dieselgate-scandal-could-and-should-have-been-prevented/)

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shaqbert
Mark my words: Just as the robber barons a century ago has lead to antitrust
law, today's "data" robber baron tech giants will lead us to data competitive
law 15 years from now.

~~~
mtgx
And just like then, the data robber barons will probably be trillionaires by
the time that happens, because by then they will have used the data to create
super-intelligent AI, which will then create that wealth for them. At that
time it won't matter what laws will be passed. The damage will have already
been done and their personal trillion dollar wealth will have already been
created.

~~~
shaqbert
Agreed. Vanderbild, Rockefeller, Morgan, and all the other robber barrons went
Scot free. So will Zuck, Larry, Sergey.

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estefan
> it being fined up to one percent of its annual turnover

Now they're fines we should be proud of. Not like the pathetic smack-on-the-
wrist fines they've dished out to banks and Google that they can earn back in
milliseconds.

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krona
J.P. Morgan was fined $13 billion, which is hardly a slap on the wrist. The
biggest fines in corporate history have been in the US; take the big tobacco
civil cases, for instance.

~~~
darklajid
Civil cases sounds like - forgive me - 'The coffee is too hot, pay for me
enough money to import it fresh using my private jet for the rest of my life'
cases.

What I'm trying to say is: I feel there's a difference between a fine ("You're
misbehaving, correct that") and greed ("You caused pain and I'm going to
benefit here"). Most large-ish rulings in the US that ever reached me are part
of the latter.

Then again, this is a matter of culture and might be fine (hah!) in the
society that caused this and just look weird from the outside.

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Jordrok
What's interesting to me is that a lot of times these things are somewhat open
for interpretation depending on your definition of a monopoly, where the line
is drawn between good business decisions and anti-competitive behavior, etc.
In this case though it seems pretty clear cut. Facebook said they couldn't
link WhatsApp and FB user ids, but then two years later they did exactly that.

Does Facebook really have any plausible response other than "oops"?

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hobarrera
> [Facebook] claimed that it wouldn't be able to knit together user IDs,
> thereby combining the data of the two services.

Facebook REQUIRES your phone number when signing up nowadays (sometimes it
asks a bit later - when you try to message peolple.

On Facebook Messenger, you sign up using you phone number.

On WhatsApp you sign up using your phone number.

I think it's pretty obvious that is was trivial to connect the two accounts.

~~~
funnyfacts365
Facebook messenger even tricked people into being the default SMS app on
Android... And given all the permissions they ask, they can read the phone
number themselves.

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tedmiston
I don't see why this is different than any other acquisition involving
combining two userbases. Unless it's about the scale.

~~~
ffggvv
Because they lied, they said they would never associate the whatsapp data with
the facebook one (and funnily enough HN believed them).

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adventured
> and funnily enough HN believed them

That reeks of a very cheap excuse to just bash HN given the dramatic
generalization you're throwing around.

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fiatjaf
The State and its uncontrollable desire to steal.

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matthewcford
This looks equally bad on the EU, that they lacked the foresight to see that
phone numbers in the WhatsApp database could be matched with phone numbers in
the Facebook database.

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Fnoord
Oh, the EU knew it _could_ happen; they were told it _wouldn 't_ happen. We
need to operate on some basic level of common trust. If you wanna do business
in the EU, you need to play by the rules.

As it turns out, not only _did_ it happen, the software/tech to make it happen
was _already ready_! That makes a pretty strong case against Facebook's
intentions.

I actually would agree that it was in hindsight stupid because of Facebook's
business model. Why else would they want to buy WhatsApp other than profiling
and spying?

Ideally, we don't even want corporations to have such huge amounts of data on
us but we're not on that level yet. We're still too ignorant on that one. More
Bad Things (tm) must happen first.

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drkwatr
My belief in why they wanted to purchase WhatsApp was it presented a threat to
fakebook [sic]. This is why they also purchased Instagram, and attempted the
same for Snapchat. If true, then WhatsApp wasn't valued at $19 billion, but
rather fakebook [sic] saw that removing the perceived threat was worth the
price.

What astounds me the most, is the FTC doesn't seem to investigate tech
acquisitions like other industries. Especially, when it seems there is a good
indication choice is being removed from the market.

Although, I've seen a few deals structured in a way to make it seem like a
smaller company is buying a larger one to avoid a review [at&t <-> SBC, Sears
Holdings <-> K-Mart].

~~~
i_cant_speel
Maybe it's because of the low cost of entry for competitors? If people get
upset with what Facebook does to WhatsApp, many other services will spring up
and people will migrate to them.

When it comes to thing like Internet service, it's not really the same
situation.

~~~
AJ007
In tech the lifecycle seems to be something like

Stage 1 - That doesn't make sense and will never work Stage 2 - They turned
down $1b they must be stupid Stage 3 - It is a monopoly and needs to be
stopped

Stages may vary but what remains the same is that nothing in tech is certain.
Companies try really hard to create monopolies that will probably have anti-
trust issues because the alternative is if they don't they will probably die
(more so true after raising a lot of money and signing expensive long term
office leases.)

From a longer historical perspective, nothing at all is certain. Take a look
at the various office skyscrapers and stadiums in the US, the names change.
Some of the giant corporations of 50 years ago may still be around in some
form, but they are shadows of their former selves. The world changes fast.

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FussyZeus
Is anything Facebook currently doing not shady?

I'm not even trying to be snarky, it just seems like every single thing
Facebook is doing lately is tainted with misinformation, corruption and spin.
Just endless spin and lies.

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holydude
Is anything <your_average_mega_corporation> currently doing not shady ? That's
becoming a really big problem.

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majewsky
Well, <some_average_mega_corp> is paying my salary in a particularly non-shady
way.

There is more to any group of people than what hits the news. (This insight is
not limited to businesses.)

