"The regulatory and legal questions around Apple’s practices are behind Facebook’s strategy that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. In its attack ads on Apple, Facebook added that it would help antitrust regulators and others — like the Fortnite parent company Epic Games — on the App Store issue."
......
But both companies have issues:
"But the cracks we are seeing this week are the most significant — and could spell trouble for both companies. Apple, pointing out Facebook’s data gluttony, and Facebook, in turn, noting Apple’s hegemony over mobile, make one thing clear: These tech companies have too much power. And no matter how you slice it, they are all in dire need of government regulation."
> Kara Swisher thinks its part of piling onto apple anti-trust by the US Government, which kinda? makes sense.
The issue is it's irrelevant to antitrust when they're not actually monopolizing anything in this context. Making a privacy setting default to private but still allowing the user to change it leaves the user in control. Apple isn't forcing the customer to do anything.
Facebook objects to this because nobody wants to be tracked, so nobody is going to turn it back on. But doing something by default that nearly every user wants while giving the 0.0% of users who don't want that the option to do it the other way is not monopolizing anything.
Compare this to the app store where they're actually restricting what the user can do by prohibiting competing stores.
As a thought experiment, ignore the moral implications of tracking and look at things in purely economic terms. From that perspective, tracking is sort of like a charge for using the Facebook app. Since Apple forbids apps from disabling functionality if the user declines tracking, they’re effectively forcing Facebook to provide their service for less compensation. If this were an actual paid service and Facebook were being forced to let the user opt out of payment, you wouldn’t just say, “Making a payment setting default to free but still allowing the user to change it leaves the user in control. Facebook objects to this because nobody wants to pay money, so nobody is going to turn it back on.”
Of course, that argument is totally invalid if you believe privacy is a right. In that case, it’s fundamentally illegitimate for Facebook to treat it as a form of payment in the first place. That’s the view espoused by the EU with the GDPR and California with the CCPA. It’s the view Apple has explicitly made into a tagline (“Privacy is a fundamental human right”). And it’s a popular view, so Facebook can’t just go out and argue they’re being short-changed. Instead, they’ve made the economic argument only in terms of indirect claims about unnamed smaller websites supposedly being unable to survive – while muddying the waters with vague warnings about “freedom” and “forced updates”, and trying to insist that tracking is actually a benefit to users. It’s a largely incoherent argument, because they can’t say what they really believe: that privacy is not a right.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/18/opinion/facebook-apple-ad...
"The regulatory and legal questions around Apple’s practices are behind Facebook’s strategy that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. In its attack ads on Apple, Facebook added that it would help antitrust regulators and others — like the Fortnite parent company Epic Games — on the App Store issue."
......
But both companies have issues:
"But the cracks we are seeing this week are the most significant — and could spell trouble for both companies. Apple, pointing out Facebook’s data gluttony, and Facebook, in turn, noting Apple’s hegemony over mobile, make one thing clear: These tech companies have too much power. And no matter how you slice it, they are all in dire need of government regulation."