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In case you are interested in tech politics, you may have heard rumors about Facebook trying to merge its services, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, for a few years now. The very idea of the measure has proven controversial since its inception.
Earlier this week, Facebook allowed select users on Messenger and Instagram to send messages from one app to another, and we got a glimpse of one of our first glimpses of what integrating Facebook platforms would look like.
As I indicated in the introduction, there is a historical context for this. The idea has been in the works for a few years. Progress on this has also been well described by Steven Levy in his book, Facebook: The Inside Story. It’s an excellent read, but if you don’t have time, here’s a short summary.
Facebook acquired Instagram and WhatsApp, promising the founders of both companies the freedom to build the platforms any way they wanted. The arrangement worked well for a few years, but then Facebook began to control them. Here is an excerpt from Levy’s book that explains how Zuckerberg thought about this:
In the beginning, Facebook was the main product and they were starting Facebook, Instagram and Messenger. It made sense to leave the founders alone and let them build their best products. “It was an incredible success,” he says. And it made sense for the first five years. But now we’re at a point where all of these products are big and important. I don’t want to just create multiple versions of the same product. We should have a more coherent and integrated business strategy ”.
Once WhatsApp and Instagram (and Oculus) got big enough, it was time to integrate these properties into the larger Facebook machine. Plenty of prompts made the process feel more tangible, from the length of bathroom doors in Facebook offices to the email IDs used by Instagram and WhatsApp employees. It was no longer @ instagram.com or @ whatsapp.com; instead, they are now read as @ fb.com.
It could be argued that service integration has always been Facebook’s plan from the beginning. But the underlying assumption, most of the time, has been that Facebook has been doing this to avoid antitrust action. The idea is that these applications currently exist as independent properties. If a regulator dissolved them, it would be a relatively straightforward process.
However, suppose these properties are built into the back-end, and the only thing that differentiates them is the user interfaces. In that case, when a break order comes in, Facebook might lift the curtain and say this is all just a product. Breaking it will mean that it will be complicated and could mean that everything stops working. And if Facebook goes down, China’s apps will take over and the United States will lose its national champion.
I see some problems with that argument. That’s because a regulator’s incentives won’t align with Facebook’s. Let me explain. The United States government, in the past, broke AT&T, one of the most complex telecommunications structures known to man at the time. Breaking Facebook can end up looking something similar. As far as the regulator is concerned, the breakdown doesn’t have to be orderly. A messy antitrust action will serve the purpose effectively, even if it looks worse.
On a personal level, I have mixed feelings about the merger of Messenger and Instagram. For one thing, it’s one less app. In the midst of the pandemic, there are more platforms than you have a say in, including Teams, Slack, Email, Messenger, Instagram Direct, and WhatsApp. But at the same time, in case you have used one service and not the other, now there may be an incentive for you to be on both.
This brings me to the second-order effect that should concern us more. Chris Cox, who recently returned to Facebook as Director of Product, was initially responsible for the integration of the applications. Cox saw that integration presented a kind of balance between losing and losing.
The integration at that time would be focused on privacy and, in addition to being a technical challenge, it would require encrypting the content of all messages in a way that even Facebook could not read them. While that’s a victory for privacy, at the same time, it would make it harder for the company to fight hate speech and information clutter. Historically, failure to curb the latter has led to problems that have had disastrous consequences globally.
While Cox is back now, the compensation never went away. Facebook integration is stuck between a rock and a hard place. Weaken / remove the encryption, and the business will instantly be rated Orwellian. If you apply encryption, it will be much more difficult to deal with bad actors on the platform. There are no winners here.
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