I'm trying to think of what it is, exactly, that Facebook has a monopoly on. The nearest I can come up with is: Facebook has a monopoly on Facebook users.
The followup question would be: how can that be broken up?
Many (most? all?) newspapers have a firewall between ad sales and news/editorial. Since news and editoral on FB is pretty much the news feed, I think duplicating the newspaper model here might be something like so:
One could split Facebook into a "connecting the whole world" company that Zuck talks about constantly and the ad company FB actually is.
The ad company would have exclusive license to fill of all the ad slots on the platform, and the social company would request ads through some kind of interface which had strict privacy controls. The ad company would take a cut and pass the rest of the cash to social network.
Just one way I think it could splitting the company could work.
Seems somewhat ridiculous to allow companies to acquire other companies/services just to force them to spin them off.
I'm for regulation, if you can come up with sensible ones. But targeting a specific company to be split up doesn't seem like it actually solved the problem in the long run. I mean look what happened with AT&T -- we're almost back to complete consolidation again.
> Seems somewhat ridiculous to allow companies to acquire other companies/services just to force them to spin them off.
Not really. If Facebook can answer "we're sorry, we'll change and fix it" to every problem, why can't a regulatory regime do the same? E.g. "We're sorry we allowed this acquisition to go through, but it turned out to actually be anticompetitive and our prior mistake doesn't change that..."
> I mean look what happened with AT&T -- we're almost back to complete consolidation again.
The unfortunate thing with AT&T is the regulators, over time and political changes, weren't consistent. I don't think we really want a politically lowest-common-denominator regulatory regime, but that's what we have.
> I'm trying to think of what it is, exactly, that Facebook has a monopoly on. The nearest I can come up with is: Facebook has a monopoly on Facebook users.
Perhaps Facebook could be thought of as a monopoly because 1) it has no clear, direct competitors, and 2) it's taken action to buy up anything that could become one [1]?
[1] successfully with Instagram and WhatsApp, and attempted with SnapChat
> The followup question would be: how can that be broken up?
It could be divested of Instagram and WhatsApp, for starters. I think its core facebook.com could also be split up in a way to increase competition further: randomly divide its users between multiple successor networks with a mandate to provide an open API for inter-operation.
One could split Facebook into a "connecting the whole world" company that Zuck talks about constantly and the ad company FB actually is.
The ad company would have exclusive license to fill of all the ad slots on the platform, and the social company would request ads through some kind of interface which had strict privacy controls. The ad company would take a cut and pass the rest of the cash to social network.
Just one way I think it could splitting the company could work.