[pembrook]

I still think you were correct, you just underestimated how long it would take for this to happen if the company was actually competent (unlike MySpace), and all the money that could be made in the meantime.

Facebook The Platform's userbase keeps getting older and less engaged, millennials and younger have largely shifted to instagram. Taken by itself, Facebook the platform doesn't have great looking prospects.

Instagram is the current hot thing, and is keeping Facebook The Company on the growth trajectory, but it too will suffer the same problem eventually.

Now that Zuck is under so much scrutiny, he won't be allowed to acquire the next hot social platform. When instagram isn't the "it" platform anymore, Facebook is doomed.

My prediction: if the US government does nothing, Facebook the company will slowly peak and then start shrinking over the next 5-10 years and the problem will start solving itself.

Their data moat becomes infinitely less valuable if the graph of users and engagement is a downward slope instead of an upward one.

[quantummkv]

> Now that Zuck is under so much scrutiny, he won't be allowed to acquire the next hot social platform. When instagram isn't the "it" platform anymore, Facebook is doomed.

Zuck got around that problem copying competitors lock, stock and barrel and using his monopoly to attempt drive out that competition.

Instagram was under threat by two "It" networks. Both of them ended up being copied in Instagram

Facebook needs to be broken up into three companies to fix it all.

[skewart]

How would breaking up Facebook into three companies fix this though? Suppose Instagram is a separate company and a new competitor starts getting popular. Why wouldn’t Instagram still just copy the competitor’s features?

It’s hard to compete with Instagram because everyone is already on Instagram, not because everyone is also on Facebook. (A lot of IG users don’t use FB much, and vice versa.) A freestanding Instagram could still easily copy and crush competitors.

[quickresponse]

Because if FB were split in three it would signal a definitive shift towards antitrust regulators actively applying the law. In that reality, all move-the-needle mergers would be subject to antitrust regulations that should have (but weren't really) applied to FB's previous acquisitions thus constraining IG's freedom to copy and crush.

[disgruntledphd2]

I think the only real failure of anti-trust regulation was in the EU. They definitely should not have allowed the Whatsapp acquisition to go ahead.

I'm not sure on what grounds the US regulators would have blocked the Whatsapp acquisition, as it basically had no competition implications in the US.

The Instagram one is harder. Sure, it was a better version fo Facebook done right for mobile, but it only had 10mn users when acquired.

I'm not convinced that IG would have been successful if it hadn't been bought by Facebook. For an example of how things can go wrong, look at Snapchat vs Instagram.

[rolph]

i think it should be more than a split, it should be outright divestment of any ownership, or controll period.