Maybe this is just me, but if I owned a business, and Congress was angry enough to write a bipartisan report slamming something my company was doing, I'd probably tell everyone to take it easy on that particular practice until things calmed down.
Again, maybe it's just me. But it's definitely not how Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg operates.
This week Facebook announced it was working on a new feature called Live Audio Rooms. This feature will allow users to listen to each other talk live in group sessions. If this sounds like the voice-based social-media app Clubhouse, that's because it is pretty much a Clubhouse clone.
This shouldn't come as too much of a surprise for anyone who's been paying attention to Silicon Valley. Facebook has a reputation for either buying, killing, or cloning its competitors, and after years, Washington has noticed the trend. In October, the House Judiciary Committee's subcommittee on antitrust put out a 450-page report on companies that have become digital monopolies — Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple. And in that report, committee members made it known that they believed Facebook's product cloning was a form of anticompetitive behavior.
It's clear as day on page 14:
Facebook has also maintained its monopoly through a series of anticompetitive business practices. The company used its data advantage to create superior market intelligence to identify nascent competitive threats and then acquire, copy, or kill these firms. Once dominant, Facebook selectively enforced its platform policies based on whether it perceived other companies as competitive threats. In doing so, it advantaged its own services while weakening other firms.
The idea behind all this — which the subcommittee uncovered in a 2018 internal memo that it subpoenaed from Facebook during its investigation — is to keep competition within Facebook's own universe of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp.
For example, you may recall that Facebook pulled this cloning trick with Snapchat by creating Instagram Stories and Threads, a product that allows users to send quick videos to their friends.
Of course, Facebook didn't necessarily need to use its data advantage to know that Clubhouse is a serious competitor for people's attention. The startup has grown quickly in the past year, and according to Bloomberg, Twitter was recently in talks to acquire the company at a $4 billion valuation before the idea fizzled out. Zuckerberg and company likely see that growth and valuation as a challenge, and since they can't kill Clubhouse by restricting its access to Facebook — like it did with Vine— that leaves copying it.
Fidji Simo, the head of Facebook's app, spoke on Tuesday at the Collision tech conference shortly after Zuckerberg announced the creation of Live Audio Rooms. When asked whether or not the new product was a Clubhouse clone, Simo complimented Clubhouse's success and said Facebook had been experimenting with all sorts of long- and short-form audio content for years. In this case, she believes Facebook is in a unique position to leverage the fact that its users already speak to each other in groups.
"I've been at Facebook for 10 years," she said. "So I know how hard it is to create something for short form. ... We think we can bring something to the table of online audio content."
With this strategy, Facebook can use its reach and resources to take the risk out of developing new products. It already knows that the audience for Clubhouse is out there, and many people in that audience already have the Facebook app on their phone.
Oh, and don't worry: Simo also said Facebook would prioritize reducing the risk of offensive and defamatory content being broadcast by using speech-to-text technology and running it through the company's artificial-intelligence models — yes, the same AI models that have been so successful in stopping the proliferation of violence and hate speech on the Facebook platform. I can't wait.
Clearly, Zuckerberg is not concerned that Congress will see this latest copycat product as another in a long line of problematic "inventions." He also seemingly is not worried that Washington will find a way to regulate Facebook's toxic behavior, even when it's acting in a bipartisan fashion like it has in this investigation.
The report that followed, called "Investigation of Competition in Digital Markets," recommends strengthening antitrust enforcement in Congress, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Trade Commission, in part by triggering civil penalties for companies that engage in "unfair methods of competition," creating symmetry with violations of rules around "unfair or deceptive acts or practices."
Not that Zuckerberg cares, obviously.
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