The name change does not seem to have helped the company created by Mark Zuckerberg. Meta fell below the barrier of 600,000 million market valuation this week, something that had not happened since May 2020. That stock market crash can have a curious effect: that the company dodges potential monopoly investigations in the United States.
Plummeting drop. Shares of Meta (formerly Facebook) have not been this low for more than a year and a half. The crisis that the brand is going through —and that prompted that name change— has worsened with the first drop in users in its history. The speech about his commitment to the metaverse does not work and in fact is causing the disbandment of investors. The thing has never looked so bad, and the competition is devastating.
If you're worth less than $600 billion, you're not a monopoly. The curious thing about this fall in the stock market is that it can have a beneficial effect for Facebook. The figure of 600,000 million dollars is curiously the barrier between being able to be a monopoly or not being one. This is indicated by regulators in the United States according to a series of reforms that were approved in the summer of 2021. If Meta remains below that figure, regulators could leave it alone at the time in terms of strategy and agreements. The (truly) giants like Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Apple or Microsoft would be much more in the crosshairs of those regulators.
But the laws change. The problem for Meta is that these reforms actually take time to implement, and may be under constant review. In fact, a more recent reform that passed through the Judicial Committee in the US changed the figure: now the market capitalization must be less than 550,000 million dollars to enter that classification of company that has something like fewer options to be a monopoly. The ways of understanding this reform that the Senate and the House of Representatives of the United States have are different, and its real application to the world of big technology is complex.
And meanwhile, around the App Store. What is happening with Meta is closely related to the new Open App Markets Act, a reform that tries to limit the power of the big technology companies and that specifically affects application stores. The idea is to boost competition in the mobile segment – where a few companies have too much power – and allow, for example, developers to use other payment gateways and not just those of the intermediary. The reform is clearly aimed at solving the problems that have been experienced with Apple, which won the lawsuit against Epic but which, together with Google, has been accused of having a dominant position in the market for software distribution on mobile devices.
