The second reason to break up Facebook is that it is the only way to create competition in the social media business — and to create it instantly. Instagram now has more than 1 billion monthly active users. WhatsApp has more than 1.6 billion. What’s more, before Facebook bought them, the two companies had much different approaches to matters such as privacy and even profitability.
For instance, WhatsApp’s chief executive officer, Jan Koum, left Facebook in 2018 after a “clash over data,” as the Washington Post put it at the time. Koum had long kept the data of WhatsApp users private, but Zuckerberg had decided the time had come for Facebook to start monetizing it. A WhatsApp that was divorced from Facebook might well establish itself as an alternative to Facebook’s data practices. Indeed, that’s what it was before it was acquired in 2014. The same could be true of Instagram. They wouldn’t compete with Facebook on price, obviously, but on all the other things social media users care about.
It’s no secret that government antitrust cases are difficult to win in court, where judges have heavily favored consolidation in recent decades. Facebook will argue — as it already has — that it won government approval of the deals fair and square. “Years after the FTC cleared our acquisitions, the government now wants a do-over,” the company said in a tweet.
But reducing Facebook’s power is one of the few issues that Republicans and Democrats agree on, and as my colleague Tae Kim notes, David Cicilline, the chair of the House antitrust subcommittee, would be well served to craft a bill that would make it easier to curb the power of the big technology companies, starting with Facebook.
As for the antitrust suits, breaking up Facebook isn’t just the right solution, it’s the only solution.
Joe Nocera is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business. He has written business columns for Esquire, GQ and the New York Times, and is the former editorial director of Fortune. His latest project is the Bloomberg-Wondery podcast "The Shrink Next Door."