‘Better to buy than compete’ Zuckerberg faces the music
Facebook faces an ‘existential’ threat as US regulators pursue its break-up in the biggest antimonopoly challenge in decades
Facebook used its "monopoly power to crush smaller rivals and snuff out competition", say 48 US states, which, along with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), in two mammoth lawsuits want it to sell off Instagram and WhatsApp.The most damning quote comes from Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself, who wrote in a 2008 e-mail about smaller competitors: "It is better to buy than compete."There you have it: the Zuckerberg approach to innovation in a sentence. This e-mail is included in the FTC’s filing, which argues that Facebook had a "systematic strategy to eliminate threats to its monopoly" and that Zuckerberg "acquired Instagram to neutralise a competitor".The two major lawsuits are the inevitable conclusion of the rise and fall of big tech and its social media giants. US lawmakers called the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google, through its holding company Alphabet, to hearings in August where they faced blistering questions about anticompetitive practices to maintain their mon...
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