Finally, it’s entirely possible that the merger is chiefly driven by an effort to stymie the progress of an ongoing antitrust lawsuit that Facebook is battling in the US.
Antitrust law exists to prevent companies from avoiding competition in their industry by becoming a monopoly, as competition is posited Photo Editing Services to benefit consumers. Across the world, experts and founding Facebook employees have been sounding the alarm over Facebook’s path toward monopoly, and much of this was spurred by the company’s acquisitions of Instagram and Whatsapp in 2012 and 2014 respectively.
One of the primary objectives for the US Federal Trade Commission would be to force Facebook to sell Instagram and WhatsApp to stop them from becoming too powerful in their industry. But—you guessed it—they won’t have to if they can argue that each app is connected to the same database.
Facebook remains a social-media superpower
Facebook’s messaging platforms combined see hundreds of billions of messages a day, and the COVID-19 crisis has only seen these numbers climb even higher. As Facebook’s power grows, and it continues to follow a pattern of buying out its competition, it’s easy to see why there are people advocating for stricter controls on the company’s behaviour.
At this stage, the new features available through this merge aren’t mandatory to use—if you want to opt out and keep Instagram and Facebook messages separate, you can