Was I happy when I heard that the FTC and more than 40 states were accusing Facebook of anti-competitive behavior and demanding they spin off Instagram and WhatsApp? Happy is an understatement. I was ecstatic.

Digging into the details, this seems like an important first step, but a difficult one. Anti-competitive behavior is hard to prove—especially when those acquisitions were approved less than a decade ago—though in this case it’s pretty well known how Facebook has had a chilling effect on the social media industry with its buy, copy, or kill approach.

The problem is in the framing: thinking of Facebook as a social media company.

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