Facebook’s co-founders has called for the social network to be broken up. Chris Hughes, who helped Mark Zuckerberg launch Facebook from his Harvard dorm 15 years ago, says that the Federal Trade Commission should reverse Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram in order to create more competition in the social media and messaging markets.
“Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American,” Hughes wrote Thursday in an editorial in The New York Times. “It is time to break up Facebook.”
His suggestion: Regulators should force Facebook to spin off Instagram and WhatsApp into separate businesses, and bar Facebook from acquisitions for several years.
“Facebook would have a brief period to spin off the Instagram and WhatsApp businesses, and the three would become distinct companies, most likely publicly traded,” Hughes writes. “Facebook shareholders would initially hold stock in the new companies, although Mark and other executives would probably be required to divest their management shares.”
Hughes argues Facebook’s monopolistic control of social media is harming innovation and doesn’t provide a benefit for the public good. Because Facebook secures $4 out of every $5 in social media revenue, by Hughes’ reckoning, there’s little incentive for investors to back other social media start-ups.
Hughes likened Facebook’s control of social media to AT&T’s monopoly on the phone business and its breakup in the 1980s. The end of the phone monopoly ushered in decades of innovation in the phone industry, spawning new companies and technologies.
Hughes joins a growing number of lawmakers who are calling for the breakup of Facebook. Notably, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has said that she will break up the likes of Facebook if she’s elected president in 2020. Others, including Zuckerberg himself, have called for increased regulation of the big tech firms.
