It seems like they were just a client for Instagram which was stripping out the ads, which would probably be a pretty clear cut violation of Instagram ToS or whatever API they were using, so I'm not surprised Google/Apple would remove it from their stores
It is unclear whether a third-party client that accesses content you are otherwise licensed to access is actually infringing, and it's likely to differ in many countries as well.
The copyright law in many countries contains a specific interoperability exception that explicitly allows such cases to enable "information exchange".
"Courts have recognised that reverse-engineering is important for public benefit and to encourage inventors and businesses thereby maintaining healthy competition in the market".[0]
Yet most technology giants are based in the States thus do what they want - within the permissive laws of their country. It's ironic how the folks here on one side get upset every time Google/Meta does something evil, yet at the same time get upset when the EU does something against Google/Meta.
I think the title here is misleading. if they had moved to take down an ad-free instagram clone, that would be anti-competitive and possibly illegal. taking down an ad-free instagram client is still unpleasant, but probably [IANAL] not illegal and somewhat justifiable.
as it is, and as is made clear deeper into the article, they took down a client
This is a bad article and does the entire story a disservice. This wasn't a clone it was a reverse engineered client which is against Instagrams ToS. You may not like it but Apple and Google were absolutely correct to take this down. The more salacious part of the story is Facebook going after the teams personal accounts. I don't believe they have any basis for that. Unfortunately that part of the story is constricted to a small blurb in the second to last section.
The modern internet sucks. I remember using Pidgin (née GAIM) in the early 2000s to access multiple chat accounts/protocols in one clean interface. Third party apps like this are very rare now.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 71.1 ms ] threadhttps://about.fb.com/news/2022/07/how-meta-safeguards-people...
One of the monopoly tests is whether or not it harms competition. This clearly did.
It's a ToS violation, not a legal one.
"Courts have recognised that reverse-engineering is important for public benefit and to encourage inventors and businesses thereby maintaining healthy competition in the market".[0]
[0] https://lexinsight.wordpress.com/2020/06/08/achieving-intero...
as it is, and as is made clear deeper into the article, they took down a client
...and perfectly legal in many parts of the world.
And also routes pic traffic via 1 IP address making it super easy to block…
Quote:
Instead they make one join the waitlist.