#social-media-competition

#social-media-competition

What's January without a TikTok panic? Last January, TikTok briefly went dark in the US amid a legal fight. This year, TikTok users were treated to days of app glitches caused by an outage at an Oracle data center, and a transition to a new joint-venture ownership structure in the US. Upstart rivals have benefited from TikTok users - particularly those concerned about TikTok's new owners' ties to the Trump administration - seeking alternatives.

To rub salt into the wound, your big brother Facebook just keeps motoring on. Taking all your best ideas and frankly doing them better, sometimes worse, but eventually doing them better too. And with 1.7bn users (a mere 1.4bn more than you), is doing so in front of more people, hence attracting more and more advertisers who continue to flock to them in their droves.

With apps surging and receding, chasing one craze and moving on from others, and adding new features with each passing year, the FTC has understandably struggled to fix the boundaries of Meta's product market. Even so, it continues to insist that Meta competes with the same old rivals it has for the last decade, that the company holds a monopoly among that small set, and that it maintained that monopoly through anticompetitive acquisitions,