> It's totally out of place with the rest of the Swift programming language. They had to add new crap to the language to accommodate its declarative style, when Swift is (was) unapologetically imperative syntax-wise. It's an obvious bolt-on and leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.

Woah now, that's interesting! In my mind swift has had awesome support for functional programming paradigms since launch. I understand it to be leaning in about as far as it can given that it's built with first class support for Obj-c oriented frameworks.

What makes you feel like it's unapologetically imperative?

I'd love any pointers to precedent for how this plays out from here.

1. The acquisition was >1 year ago. (And there's some question of whether FB followed the correct process.)

2. The antitrust concern is in one major market with a ton of political and regulatory power — but still one of many. (Are there international trade agreements that inherently make this ruling impactful outside of the UK?)

3. The acquired company was very unlikely to find a better outcome, and would have been fairly likely to require costly restructuring for lack of this one.

I don't take this super seriously — because giphy feels replicable and, well, it's gifs. But curious if anyone else sees impactful competitive/strategic concerns, or if the matter at hand is really just political precedent setting.

Mostly I feel bad for giphy people. Hope they're nicely contractually protected.

In any acquisition an assessment of the regulatory risks has to be part of the process for the vendor. They took a risk in selling to FB and that risk hasn’t paid off. No one is entitled to the ‘best’ price if it involves something which falls foul of competition law.

And on competition - will anyone else be interested in GIFs if the dominant social network owns the market leader?

>And there's some question of whether FB followed the correct process.

There are more than questions - FB was found guilty and fined for not following the correct process.

> “Companies are not required to seek CMA approval before they complete an acquisition but, if they decide to go ahead with a merger, we can stop the companies from integrating further if we think consumers might be affected and an investigation is needed.”

> He added: “We warned Facebook that its refusal to provide us with important information was a breach of the order but, even after losing its appeal in two separate courts, Facebook continued to disregard its legal obligations. This should serve as a warning to any company that thinks it is above the law.”

> I want this to be the start of a forced breakup of Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram.

okay

> There’s zero benefit to consumers, and a lot of harm.

There's a ton of potential societal benefit in centralization and/or monopoly in theory. There's also a ton of potential downside. What in particular makes this fall in the latter bucket?

Where's the advantage of instagram, whatsapp and Facebook belonging to one company? The only advantage on any side I can see is combining user data and behavior data to improve ad revenue.

You could argue that features can make it easier across products, but each product would be big enough on their own to develop these features at little cost compared to their income. Apart from that there's no potential upside I can see for a user to have these products under one company.

The same applies to Giphy. Right now, messenger companies don't own Gif companies and it's still very easy to use them together. I don't see the benefit here for a user to have them owned by the same company.

> Where's the advantage of instagram, whatsapp and Facebook belonging to one company?

Common-ish arguments for monopolies, as applied to this situation:

* potentially the interoperability you indicate

* infrastructure investment leading to stability

* similarly: best in class client side software

* security / privacy guarantees (yes. I know, ironic, etc. but the fully distributed multi-company alternative is likely worse on these dimensions)

* single point of accountability for the state and law enforcement. (yes. not likely a HN concern. Still valuable to the state and potentially regular consumers.)

* general pro monopoly argument: fewer resources are wasted in competition, and so can be applied to product development and research. i.e. bell labs

IDK how I feel the scales tip in this case, but treating it as cut and dry feels a bit naive.

All of those points would likely be true of independent Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook. They are still huge companies, with huge budgets.

If anything, being a centralised conglomerate makes them less stable, less secure. And with less competition, they actually become more wasteful.

The argument’s about societal wastefulness, not FB’s business acumen.

I.e. It’s nontrivial to be more wasteful than it would be to have multiple teams duplicating the same product.

(Strong disagree on your suggestion that the centralisation generally makes them less stable/secure, but granted on the tail risks.)

If we want to talk about "societal wastefulness", then we can probably stop wasting resources on Facebook in the first place.

Sounds good to me. My social media usage is restricted to GitHub and Hacker News. HN is on the chopping block however.

So turn it all into a state run company instead? Your points sound as if that would be a potential solution. But that would have its own issues with somewhat twisted incentive structures.

FWIW State granted monopolies are a common pattern for infrastructure.

Strong +1 on the ensuing twisted incentives.

"* general pro monopoly argument: fewer resources are wasted in competition, and so can be applied to product development and research. i.e. bell labs"

You are arguing for Central Planning. You can't be pro-free market and pro monopoly.

At least government monopoly is theoretically accountable to the voters.

"In theory" is an important caveat there. .

Downsides:

* Higher risk - a bigger database to attack.

* A very big single point of failure

* Slows down innovation

* Less private

Upsides (for society):

* ???

There’s a pretty good argument for functional monopolies facilitating innovation! We like our transistors and all that.

Transistors were originally invented during WW2. Reductio ad absurdum - we should have one big state monopoly controlling everything in the interests of permanent warfare.

The vacuum tube transistor was invented in 1907 by Forest, the modern solid-state transistor in 1947 by Bardeen and Brattain.

That does feel like pretty much what is happening.

There's a ton of potential societal benefit in a benevolent dictator in theory. There's also a ton of potential downside.

Usually we dont ask "What in particular makes this fall in the latter bucket?"

This is the newly-normal software subscription package or a stipend to bootstrap a project. Both feel pretty normal!

Even if it is the former, updates & improvements take work. And they seem likely to be necessary here.

The deliverables of any software project is obviously incremental in nature (EG, Initial boot with software graphics, 2D graphics, power saving features, 3D graphics etc), so the funding model makes sense

...and this is how podcasting dies.

Just like how TV shows died once they became exclusive to one network or streaming service!

Just like how the blog-web died with walled gardens.

TV shows were always centrally distributed.

Perhaps a better example is Howard Stern?

Or this is how the Joe Rogan show dies.

Did radio die when Howard Stern signed with Sirius?

I could never set up my own radio station :).

The point of spotify moving into podcasts is to make a netflix-like channel that 1) attracts user and so 2) attracts more publishers. In turn, Spotify can do dynamically targeted and unskippable advertising which attracts more advertisers, and so more publishers.

As users and publishers leave the open, rss based, podcast world will have significant downwards pressure.

Point taken.

I am a paid subscriber to Stratechery and Dithering; I hope this model wins. The creators get paid directly.

https://stratechery.com/podcasts/

With thunderous applause.

This is a lovely essay. Wonderful layers-of-reality analogy to quantum mechanics.

Yes. That's the reason why I saved it. I don't know much about quantum mechanism, but I could feel a vague intuition developing after reading this essay.

    "Airbnb announced today that Silver Lake and Sixth Street Partners will invest $1 billion in Airbnb in a combination of debt and equity securities."

What does this mean relative to a private stock purchase?

Ah, the great assertion of disruption:

  their roles have simply shifted to focus on more valuable activities

I resent the length of my time the author spent, verbosely and banally, telling me that he resents the length of his time Wallace spent through banal verbosity in Infinite Jest.

i've heard it's strongly coupled to windows' underlying rendering.

also, probably lack of value to microsoft.

It was probably based on IE which was and maybe still is used to render help pages on windows and probably other things.