Facebook is not a monopoly in its actual market — advertising — and the product it offers is not essential to the U. S. economy or society. Even worse, it’s not clear that breaking Facebook up would solve the biggest problems with the platform, such as misinformation and data collection.
Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes laid out his arguments for breaking up the company in a lengthy op-ed for The New York Times on Thursday.
The essence of his argument seems to be that a single person, Mark Zuckerberg, has too much control over the communications platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, that billions of people use. Therefore, the government should force Facebook to divest its other communications platforms and create a new agency to regulate tech companies, particularly around privacy.
The break-up argument is compelling if you’re predisposed to dislike Zuckerberg and Facebook after the last few years of blunders related to user data and misinformation, and Facebook’s often tone-deaf or seemingly indifferent responses to these incidents. (Zuckerberg didn’t do himself any favors by cracking an awkward joke about his company’s privacy troubles in his speech at a company conference last week.)
It’s also illogical, difficult and a waste of time.
Facebook is not a monopoly in its actual market — advertising — and the product it offers is not essential to the U. S. economy or society. Even worse, it’s not clear that breaking Facebook up would solve the biggest problems with the platform, such as misinformation and data collection. Those problems would better be solved through targeted, strictly enforced regulation.
Consider the following:
Hughes seems to be defining the relevant market that Facebook dominates as « social networking. » But there’s no clear definition of the term. Is a social network any digital platform that allows users to establish and maintain lists of contacts and communicate with them? If so, then Apple iMessage is a social network. So are generalized mobile text messaging, or SMS, and email platforms such as Gmail.
I would argue that « social network » is an invented marketing term that was used to brand a set of new internet-based communications platforms that emerged in the wake of the dot-com bust. Those platforms didn’t serve any particular new need or function, they simply offered an easier and more fun way to communicate via the web. If you want to break up Facebook, call it what it is — a communications service.
