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by tragic
2726 days ago
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You could split off the ad selling wing from the rest of it for a start. It would be drastic, for obvious reasons, but forcible de-merging huge businesses is always drastic, cf Hollywood, Ma Bell, and so forth. Nothing would stop close partnerships but GDPR-style regulation would hopefully stop the most egregiously invasive kinds of data brokerage. The truth is that regulation is always and everywhere a game of whack a mole, and as long as capitalism exists someone will have to wave the comedy mallet around. |
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Normally when businesses are split up, they are broken into multiple pieces that each have their own revenue and are viable standalone businesses.
In this case, the ad-selling part of Facebook is the entire business as far as financials are concerned. It's the only material source of revenue for Facebook. If you were to split the ad-selling wing from Facebook, then the "remaining part" would have no revenue. A regulator action along these lines is tantamount to crippling or shutting down the business.
Source: Facebook Q3 2018 earnings show that the only material revenue is advertising at $13.5 billion (Q3 2018): https://investor.fb.com/investor-events/event-details/2018/F...
For comparison, Microsoft reports earnings from many separate lines of business including Windows OEM, Office, Office 365, Enterprise Services, LinkedIn, Azure, server products, Gaming, etc. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2018-Q3...