THERE IS PERHAPS more focus on Facebook’s dominant position within social media right now than there ever has been.
Facebook bought WhatsApp for $16 billion in 2014 and bought Instagram for $1 billion two years before that.If Facebook’s monopolistic behavior was checked back when it should’ve been , the continents of people who depend on WhatsApp & IG for either communication or commerce would be fine right now. Break them up.
Yes someone can to go and set up an alternative to Facebook, but if all your friends are on Facebook, or more likely, Instagram or WhatsApp, then there’s not much point in being on it. So we need to see a challenge to the monopoly power of Facebook. Labour’s Ged Nash TD agrees that there needs to be “an ongoing, global conversation” about the influence of global social media firms.
It’s never a good idea that any single company or any group of companies could operate what might appear to be a quasi-monopoly or quasi-cartel. It’s not good for competition, it’s not good for business and it’s not good for society either. It’s an ongoing conversation and it’s a conversation that I think we as a State need to be actively involved in given the presence of very large tech giants in this country.
“We will look in detail at whether this data gives Facebook an undue competitive advantage in particular on the online classified ads sector… where Facebook also competes with companies from which it collects data,” the EU commissioner for competition, Margrethe Vestager said at the time.
She's right.
Say that one that give political “speeches” while doing make up on Instagram
The sooner the better.....