US antitrust chief Makan Delrahim says the Justice Department (DOJ) will be watching Facebook’s messaging integration, reported Bloomberg.
Speaking at the State of the Net conference, Delrahim said, “We’ll watch it with interest” even though it wouldn’t trigger any merger review.The DOJ will still have interest in whether combining the message services gives Facebook anticompetitive market power, he said.
When asked whether past mergers might have been a mistake, he said “I’m not privy to the facts and the economics of some of those past mergers. It’s really easy to say that Facebook and Instagram should have never been allowed to merge, and they should be competing today.”
On Friday, January 25, CPI reported that Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg planned to integrate WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook Messenger at the technical level.
A Messenger user would be able to send an end-to-end encrypted conversation with someone who only has a WhatsApp account for instance. Messenger, Instagram, and WhatsApp will remain separate apps on the home screen, but the common messaging features will be unified they reported
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