The opening to Chris Hughes’ much-publicized New York Times essay yesterday—attacking the company that made him vastly wealthy—was almost Shakespearean in its drama. After describing his last personal meeting with the Zuckerbergs—in their house, sharing a hug in parting with Mark’s wife, Priscilla—he lays out in 6,000-word detail how the empire Mark Zuckerberg built should be systematically dismantled and regulated for the good of us all.

Such proposals have been made before, by Elizabeth Warren, myself, and many others, but Hughes’ standing is something else altogether. His history with Zuckerberg and Facebook goes back a decade and a half. As Hughes described in this morning’s The Daily podcast, he actually shared a dorm room with a young Zuckerberg in their sophomore year at Harvard, back when the titan-to-be seemed little different than any other undergrad, worrying about dates and tidying up his room.

Antonio García Martínez (@antoniogm) is a writer and Ideas contributor for WIRED. Previously he worked on Facebook’s early monetization team, where he headed its targeting efforts. His 2016 memoir, Chaos Monkeys, was a New York Times best seller and NPR Best Book of the Year.

The picture Hughes paints of the later Zuckerberg—the young CEO Hughes began working for when he joined the budding social network after graduation—is very different. Much of Zuckerberg’s limitless drive to make Facebook successful was an apparent desire to achieve “domination” rather than mere riches.

My own contact with Zuckerberg as a Facebook employee was limited to a few meetings, but I experienced the company and culture he very much had a hand in creating, and that insatiable desire to dominate was still present years later. The advertising team I worked for and the revenue it produced were relative afterthoughts. It was all about usage and engagement. Sixteen years after the company’s founding, there’s no reason to think it will ever change under his leadership

Two very relevant examples of that drive were the acquisitions of Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. I’ve often joked that the secret to making a billion dollars in Silicon Valley is very simple: merely show Mark Zuckerberg a user growth chart that resembles Facebook’s in its early years. That’s precisely what the founders of Instagram and WhatsApp did, and it would be naïve indeed to claim Facebook bought the companies as anything other than an anticompetitive bid to head off future rivals.

So far, the plan has worked out: As usage of the core Facebook app has declined, the other two apps have filled in the gaps, boosting the Facebook conglomerate’s user growth to almost 2.4 billion people. Users might leave Facebook itself, but they don’t go far, opting for Instagram or WhatsApp instead. In the early decades of US antitrust enforcement, the mere act of buying up rivals to avoid competition was itself a violation. The current antitrust standard views violations through the lens of consumer harm—usually asking whether a merger or acquisition resulted in price hikes. But what does that even mean with a free app?

What it means is a lack of innovation. As Hughes argues, tech sectors with large, unchallenged incumbents—search, social, ecommerce—see relative stagnation as Google, Facebook, and Amazon acquire, copy, or dissuade upstart rivals while growing complacent in their own efforts at innovation. The stickiness of users to those companies might have as much to do with the lack of alternatives as with the quality of the current products.

While I’m less convinced of stagnation at Amazon or perhaps even Google, I see it more at my former employer. Ask yourself this: What new user feature has Facebook launched in the past five years (that wasn’t copied from some other app)? Facebook’s last creative gasp was an effort called Creative Labs, which launched long-forgotten apps like Slingshot and Rooms and was shuttered in 2015.

Or consider the team I worked on while at Facebook, ads. What fundamentally new advertising products has Facebook launched in the past few years? The company’s core moneymakers are the same handful of products launched during those fecund (and desperate) years around the IPO. Some monopolies, such as Bell Labs (back in the day) or Google (today), invest their excess profits in interesting R&D that benefits everyone. Where are the comparable efforts at Facebook that might justify an entrenched monopoly?

In addition to its hold on users, Facebook has a stranglehold on human attention. It is, as the title of Tim Wu’s excellent book on digital advertising puts it, the world’s premier attention merchant. Media—actual content creators like CNN, The Washington Post, or this magazine—must often bow to Facebook’s demands on how content is distributed on their platform, either catering content for Newsfeed distribution or “pivoting to video” when the company decides that’s the next big product play (and regretting it when Facebook changes its mind).