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How is it anti competitive for Meta to exit the market? In fact, it’s opening up the market to anyone else who can make a valid business case and still pay the fees demanded by these news organizations, so i would say it’s more pro competition. Can someone explain the anti competition angle?



This is their claim:

> "Meta's practices are clearly designed to discipline Canadian news companies, prevent them from participating in and accessing the advertising market, and significantly reduce their visibility to Canadians on social media channels," the CBC said in a joint statement with the Canadian Association of Broadcasters and News Media Canada, a trade organization that represents newspapers.

> "Meta's anticompetitive conduct, which has attracted the attention of regulators around the world, will strengthen its already dominant position in advertising and social media distribution and harm Canadian journalism," the statement read.

> "The applicants ask the Competition Bureau to use its investigative and prosecutorial tools to protect competition and prohibit Meta from continuing to block Canadians' access to news content."


Meta is a near monopoly in the market they are in. There are no competitors that are a reasonable substitution for their product.


There's plenty of social media where you can share the news, and whose content might be predominantly driven by it, e.g. Reddit and Twitter.

On the other hand, Facebook was made to be a site for connecting friends and family. Is it really made that much better for anyone other than news media companies to have the news available on Facebook? People have been complaining for years about Facebook's deterioration for its original purpose. If Facebook wants to, for example, shift to promoting more content about users' personal lives and experiences over short-term engagement-maximising ragebait, why should they be stopped? The idea of requiring Facebook to continue acting as an agent of social harm in order to shore up the profits of a few news media companies seems rather perverse.




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