Tim Cook Vs. Mark Zuckerberg: How The High-Profile Dispute Is Intensifying

As Facebook Inc. FB and Apple Inc. AAPL are facing antitrust investigations by regulators, the CEOs of the companies are trading barbs, heating up a years-long tension between the two tech CEOs.

Facebook On Apple: On Thursday it was reported that Facebook is closer to filing an antitrust lawsuit against Apple.

Facebook accuses Apple of forcing its developers to follow rules pertaining to advertising on the App Store that Apple itself doesn’t follow.

The suit could also cover Facebook’s frustration that Apple users must use Apple’s iMessage as the default messaging service instead of other services such as WhatsApp.

In Facebook’s third-quarter conference call on Wednesday Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg railed against Apple’s iMessage for storing “non-end-to-end encrypted backups of your messages by default unless you disable iCloud."

Zuckerberg went on to tout WhatsApp for its security features, which he says make it “far superior.”

Apple On Facebook: Speaking at the Computers, Privacy and Data Protection conference on Thursday Apple CEO Tim Cook attacked social media platforms for allowing the sharing of “conspiracy theories and violent incitement simply because of their high rates of engagement.”

Although he didn’t name Facebook specifically, he went on to accuse social media platforms of allowing anti-vaccination conspiracies to spread as well as for allowing extremist groups to use the platforms to incite violence.

What’s Next: The two tech giants clearly have very different views on how data and information should be handled on the internet. Facebook prefers a more open and less regulated approach, whereas Apple believes that social media platforms have to take responsibility for the information its users have available to them.

If the past is any prediction of the future, however, this battle doesn’t look as though it will end any time soon.

Apple CEO Tim Cook. Courtesy photo.