[moosey]

There are a number of options, and not all of them are splitting the company into a bunch of fully co-equal units, which is a process that works better when things cover an area.

In telecom, it was typical, due to regulation, that you'd have different parts of the business that couldn't interact at all. I wasn't permitted to talk to people with certain badges because of their business unit. You could easily do this with the advertising business for each of these large companies, or split it off entirely, and force that ad exchange to work with their competitors, for instance. You could regulate the news feed so that the pipe was a lot dumber and configurable, so that the company would no longer be allowed to experiment on human psyches.

There are tons of options that don't result in breaking facebook into 12 facebooks. Pulling the advertising out, and regulating advertising in general, is the best solution I've been able to spitball though.

[l3robot]

Interesting points