The news of the grand integration plan by Facebook had come to us at the beginning of this year. However, it seems the project has been examined by the Federal Trade Commission &the integration has faced a lot of criticismuptill now.
The Federal TradeCommission is now studying whether to seek a court order in order to stop Facebook’s effort in enabling messaging to users of all the three social media platforms, namely Whatsapp, Instagram & Facebook.
The US antitrust enforcers have taken this thing seriously & seeking court’s help in stopping Facebook’s project to merge technology systems enabling users to have communication across the company’s applications.
In January this year, Facebook Inc. announced its new integration plan with the aim to allow users to communicate through the messaging service of Instagram with those using Whatsapp & with those using the Facebook app & site. And, the motive behind this integration given by Facebook was to control & view foreign election interference in a better way& topics of terrorism or other related issues.
However, this entire thing has faced a lot of criticism from all those people who believe that it would be difficult to break up Facebook as a part of any antitrust case against the company. And, to check if Facebook has violated any antitrust laws, the FTC, the US Justice Department & other states are investigating the matter.
A concept called ‘interoperability’ is where many technological services can work together even when different companies provide them; for instance, Google’s email service can communicate with Microsoft’s messages. Whereas mobile chatting is yet not well integrated & Facebook’s integration plan was aimed at this but, critics called it as a source of danger to user privacy.
The Justice Department, with officials from Australia & the UK, said that Facebook should stop this integration until it provides lawful access to user communications.
All this affected Facebook’s shares as well to make it fall to as much as 4%. It fell 2.7% to $196.75 in New York.
