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House anti-trust chair says breaking up Facebook-Instagram would be right move

David Cicilline, the Democratic chair of the House report on anti-trust, said he'd be comfortable separating Instagram from Facebook.
Written by Tiernan Ray, Senior Contributing Writer

Following the 349-page report by the U.S. House of Representatives' subcommittee on anti-trust, released yesterday afternoon, the chair of the committee, Democratic rep. David Cicilline of Rhode Island, on Wednesday said he thinks it would be a good idea ot separate Instagram from Facebook, according to Reuters

Cicilline told Reuters in an interview today that "Facebook should not have been allowed to buy Instagram," according to the account by Reuters staff. 

 "I would be comfortable with unwinding that. I think that's the right answer," Cicilline told the news service, referring to Facebook's purchase of Instagram for $737 million in 2012.

In the report issued Tuesday, Cicilline and staff said that buying Instagram was part of Facebook's removal of competition in the social networking market. Facebook has become so dominant that the only real competition is between Facebook and its own properties, including Instagram, said the committee.

"Facebook has tipped the market toward monopoly such that Facebook competes more vigorously among its own products—Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger—than with actual competitors," the authors of the report write.

In related news, Apple this afternoon rebutted claims of abuse of power in the report in a statement to the Web site MacRumors.

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