Insights: Facebook Won Big Antitrust Decision, But Big Tech’s Headaches Are Far From Done
Facebook scored a couple of big wins this week in a major antitrust suit by the Federal Trade Commission and nearly 50 states when a judge threw out the states’ case and told the FTC it needed to provide more evidence of actual violations.
The decisions immediately benefited Facebook shareholders, who saw the company’s share prices jump, pushing its valuation past $1 trillion for the first time. But as often happens in the era of meme stocks and twitchy retail investor apps, that vote of confidence may prove slightly premature.
In fact, it may lead to even more problems for not just Facebook, but all the other tech giants facing growing pressure over anti-competitive tactics. Here’s why:
To start with, the judge tossed out the states’ case, saying they should have acted back in 2012 and 2014 to oppose Facebook’s acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram. Basically, the judge used a “speak now or forever hold your peace” approach to the states’ objections to the increasing market power of the two giant apps, which each have more than one billion users.
But if that’s going to be the case going forward, state regulators will have all the more reason to nearly automatically oppose big deals, or even potentially big deals involving major companies.
If states need to presume they won’t get a second chance to reconsider and unwind deals that lead to impermissible market power and abuses, they’re going to need to Just Say No.
That won’t unwind the WhatsApp and Instagram deals, but likely will lead to far more state-level headaches for big tech companies going forward.
The judge also blocked the FTC case, but gave the federal body 30 days to refile with more evidence of antitrust behavior.
Given the new FTC chair Lina Khan made her reputation calling for changes in antitrust law, expect a sharper edge on the filing that comes back here.
This is a big reason why Amazon, already facing its own antirust case on vendor pricing requirements and potentially its MGM acquisition, asked that Khan be recused for bias, given her past criticisms of Amazon’s problematic behavior.
The decisions, which almost certainly will be appealed, also could spur further action by legislators, exactly what Big Tech companies are furiously lobbying to avoid.
A separate ruling set off a gold rush to sign college athlete-influencers
Just look what happened with the NCAA this week, finally, after a big court decision. In that case, a 9-0 U.S. Supreme Court decision brutally rebuked the college sports regulator for its egregious foot-dragging over compensation for student athletes.
While the specific case was narrowly focused, it also made clear the court won’t have much patience for NCAA intransigence over Name, Image and Likeness rules.
As I wrote earlier this month, the court practically invited ruinous additional antitrust suits against the college sports regulator if it didn’t stop, to use Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s term, “price fixing labor.”
So, after years of logjams and delay, the NCAA this week approved an interim blanket approval of NIL rules across the country, hours before new laws in six states took effect. The interim policy likely will remain in place quite a long time, given stalemates within the organization and in Congress over details of a permanent national policy.
And with the interim policy in place, it’s set off a gold rush to sign college athletes with promising off-field relationships and skills.
TMZ reported that Hercy Miller, an incoming freshman at Tennessee State University joining its men’s basketball team, signed a $2 million deal with an unnamed tech company the day after the new rules took effect. Miller isn’t headed to a basketball powerhouse, but he does have one advantage other athletes may not: his father is rap star, label owner, and all-around entrepreneur Master P.
There are going to be plenty of other talented, telegenic, and social media-savvy college athletes, in all kinds of sports and schools, signing up as brands get ready to take advantage of the new opportunities.
As one example, consumer products giant Unilever has set aside $5 million over the next five years in budget for a single one of its brands, Degree deodorant, for deals with college athletes. According to the Wall Street Journal, those funds aren’t just headed to big names in football and men’s basketball, either.
It’s a brave new world for college athlete-influencers. The tech giants better understand the ground is changing under their feet, too.
Today, we are releasing Facebook Graph API v18.0 and Marketing API v18.0. As part of this release, we are highlighting changes below that we believe are relevant to parts of our developer community. These changes include announcements, product updates, and notifications on deprecations that we believe are relevant to your application(s)’ integration with our platform.
For a complete list of all changes and their details, please visit our changelog.
General Updates
Consolidation of Audience Location Status Options for Location Targeting
As previously announced in May 2023, we have consolidated Audience Location Status to our current default option of “People living in or recently in this location” when choosing the type of audience to reach within their Location Targeting selections. This update reflects a consolidation of other previously available options and removal of our “People traveling in this location” option.
We are making this change as part of our ongoing efforts to deliver more value to businesses, simplify our ads system, and streamline our targeting options in order to increase performance efficiency and remove options that have low usage.
This update will apply to new or duplicated campaigns. Existing campaigns created prior to launch will not be entered in this new experience unless they are in draft mode or duplicated.
Add “add_security_recommendation” and “code_expiration_minutes” to WA Message Templates API
Earlier this year, we released WhatsApp’s authentication solution which enabled creating and sending authentication templates with native buttons and preset authentication messages. With the release of Graph API v18, we’re making improvements to the retrieval of authentication templates, making the end-to-end authentication template process easier for BSPs and businesses.
With Graph API v18, BSPs and businesses can have better visibility into preset authentication message template content after creation. Specifically, payloads will return preset content configuration options, in addition to the text used by WhatsApp. This improvement can enable BSPs and businesses to build “edit” UIs for authentication templates that can be constructed on top of the API.
Note that errors may occur when upgrading to Graph API v18 if BSPs or businesses are taking the entire response from the GET request and providing it back to the POST request to update templates. To resolve, the body/header/footer text fields should be dropped before passing back into the API.
Re-launching dev docs and changelogs for creating Call Ads
- Facebook Reels Placement for Call Ads
Meta is releasing the ability to deliver Call Ads through the Facebook Reels platform. Call ads allow users to call businesses in the moment of consideration when they view an ad, and help businesses drive more complex discussions with interested users. This is an opportunity for businesses to advertise with call ads based on peoples’ real-time behavior on Facebook. Under the Ad set Level within Ads Manager, businesses can choose to add “Facebook Reels” Under the Placements section. - Re-Launching Call Ads via API
On September 12, 2023, we’re providing updated guidance on how to create Call Ads via the API. We are introducing documentation solely for Call Ads, so that 3P developers can more easily create Call Ads’ campaigns and know how to view insights about their ongoing call ad campaigns, including call-related metrics. In the future, we also plan to support Call Add-ons via our API platform. Developers should have access to the general permissions necessary to create general ads in order to create Call Ads via the API platform.Please refer to developer documentation for additional information.
Deprecations & Breaking Changes
Graph API changes for user granular permission feature
We are updating two graph API endpoints for WhatsAppBusinessAccount. These endpoints are as follows:
- Retrieve message templates associated with WhatsAppBusiness Account
- Retrieve phone numbers associated with WhatsAppBusiness Account
With v18, we are rolling out a new feature “user granular permission”. All existing users who are already added to WhatsAppBusinessAccount will be backfilled and will continue to have access (no impact).
The admin has the flexibility to change these permissions. If the admin changes the permission and removes access to view message templates or phone numbers for one of their users, that specific user will start getting an error message saying you do not have permission to view message templates or phone numbers on all versions v18 and older.
Deprecate legacy metrics naming for IG Media and User Insights
Starting on September 12, Instagram will remove duplicative and legacy, insights metrics from the Instagram Graph API in order to share a single source of metrics to our developers.
This new upgrade reduces any confusion as well as increases the reliability and quality of our reporting.
After 90 days of this launch (i.e. December 11, 2023), we will remove all these duplicative and legacy insights metrics from the Instagram Graph API on all versions in order to be more consistent with the Instagram app.
We appreciate all the feedback that we’ve received from our developer community, and look forward to continuing to work together.
Please review the media insights and user insights developer documentation to learn more.
Deprecate all Facebook Wi-Fi v1 and Facebook Wi-Fi v2 endpoints
Facebook Wi-Fi was designed to improve the experience of connecting to Wi-Fi hotspots at businesses. It allowed a merchant’s customers to get free Wi-Fi simply by checking in on Facebook. It also allowed merchants to control who could use their Wi-Fi and for how long, and integrated with ads to enable targeting to customers who had used the merchant’s Wi-Fi. This product was deprecated on June 12, 2023. As the partner notice period has ended, all endpoints used by Facebook Wi-Fi v1 and Facebook Wi-Fi v2 have been deprecated and removed.
API Version Deprecations:
As part of Facebook’s versioning schedule for Graph API and Marketing API, please note the upcoming deprecations:
Graph API
- September 14, 2023: Graph API v11.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- February 8, 2024: Graph API v12.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- May 28, 2024: Graph API v13.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
Marketing API
- September 20, 2023: Marketing API v14.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- September 20, 2023: Marketing API v15.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
- February 06, 2024: Marketing API v16.0 will be deprecated and removed from the platform
To avoid disruption to your business, we recommend migrating all calls to the latest API version that launched today.
Facebook Platform SDK
As part of our 2-year deprecation schedule for Platform SDKs, please note the upcoming deprecations and sunsets:
- October 2023: Facebook Platform SDK v11.0 or below will be sunset
- February 2024: Facebook Platform SDK v12.0 or below will be sunset
First seen at developers.facebook.com
Before today (August 28, 2023), advertisers could not promote images and/or videos used in Instagram Stories as ads via the Instagram Marketing API. This process created unwanted friction for our partners and their customers.
After consistently hearing about this pain point from our developer community, we have removed this unwanted friction for advertisers and now allow users to seamlessly promote their image and/or video media used in Instagram Stories as ads via the Instagram Marketing API as of August 28, 2023.
We appreciate all the feedback received from our developer community, and hope to continue improving your experience.
Please review the developer documentation to learn more.
First seen at developers.facebook.com
Launching second release of Facebook Reels API: An enterprise solution for desktop and web publishers
We’re excited to announce that the second release of FB Reels API is now publicly available for third-party developers. FB Reels API enables users of third-party platforms to share Reels directly to public Facebook Pages and the New Pages Experience.
FB Reels API has grown significantly since the first release in September 2022. The new version of the APIs now support custom thumbnails, automatic music tagging, tagging collaborators, longer format of reels and better error handling.
FB Reels API will also support scheduling and draft capability to allow creators to take advantage of tools provided either by Meta or by our partners. Based on the feedback we received from our partners, we’ll now provide additional audio insights via the Audio Recommendations API and reels performance metrics via the Insights API.
Our goal in the next couple of releases is to continue to make it easier for creators to develop quality content by adding features like early copyright detection and A/B testing. We’re also excited to start working on enhanced creation features like Video clipping- so stay tuned to hear more about those features in the future.
Call-to-Action
If you are a developer interested in integrating with the Facebook Reels API, please refer to the Developer Documents for more info.
Not sure if this product is for you? Check out our entire suite of sharing offerings.
Tune in to Product @scale event to learn more about FB Video APIs and hear from some of our customers.
First seen at developers.facebook.com
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