WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING

Facebook is too powerful

The anti-monopolist spirit that animates Ms. Warren’s policy has found an unlikely vessel in Chris Hughes, who created Facebook with Mr. Zuckerberg when the two were roommates at Harvard. In a nearly 6,000-word Op-Ed for The Times, Mr. Hughes argues that Mr. Zuckerberg, whom he considers a “good, kind person,” simply has more influence over how businesses and people relate than any individual should. (Here are five takeaways from his piece.) “Mark’s power,” he says, “is unprecedented and un-American,” and must be curtailed. He writes:

Facebook has earned the prize of domination. It is worth half a trillion dollars and commands, by my estimate, more than 80 percent of the world’s social networking revenue. It is a powerful monopoly, eclipsing all of its rivals and erasing competition from the social networking category.

Mr. Hughes contends that Facebook’s dominance prohibits would-be entrepreneurs from creating alternative social networks, suffocating innovation and restricting consumer choice. The damage extends to industries beyond tech, including journalism, whose business model was broken by Facebook’s and Google’s capture of digital advertising revenue. In warning about the dangers of Facebook’s monopolistic ambitions, Mr. Hughes cites Tim Wu, a Columbia Law School professor and the author of “The Curse of Bigness,” who told Wired’s editor, Nicholas Thompson:

Mark Zuckerberg wrote an email when he was acquiring Instagram that was disclosed in the New York Post, and it suggests he was buying Instagram because he saw it as a competitive threat. Now, it is a felony under U.S. law to buy companies that you believe are competitive threats to you. … The American way is that we believe in competition and that companies should fight it out, not buy each other when there’s serious competition.

But the most pernicious aspect of Facebook’s hegemony, Mr. Hughes says, is Mr. Zuckerberg’s “unilateral control over speech.” He points as an example to Mr. Zuckerberg’s 2017 decision to stop Facebook Messenger from being used in Myanmar to spread calls for the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims. At the same time, United Nations investigators and human rights groups said that the company didn’t do nearly enough and, in its negligence, actively facilitated what has since been deemed a genocide.

“Mark knows that this is too much power,” Mr. Hughes writes.

Breaking up Facebook isn’t a silver bullet

Breaking up Facebook isn’t enough, as even Mr. Hughes admits, since it won’t address some of society’s greatest grievances with the platform, argues Evelyn Douek in Slate. On the issue of election security, she writes:

If we’re worried about Russia or other foreign powers using Facebook and other social media platforms to influence elections — as Sen. Elizabeth Warren mentions when making her case for breakup — then we also need to acknowledge that these influence campaigns are often sophisticated, cross-platform operations that require well-resourced, expert and coordinated responses. No one has made a good case for how breakup and competition would aid these efforts.

Ms. Douek also agrees with Mr. Hughes that Mr. Zuckerberg’s control over speech is deeply troubling. But she fails to see how increased competition would have helped in Myanmar, where the military purposefully spread violent propaganda. Authoritarianism and ethnic hatred are not problems the market can solve, nor are “the most intractable issues about how to moderate speech on any individual platform.”

User privacy, Shira Ovide argues in Bloomberg, is another issue that breaking apart the Facebook platform from Instagram and WhatsApp wouldn’t fix. She writes:

Does a core Facebook with perhaps 1 billion users have less ability to harvest information such as people’s web-surfing habits and physical locations as they roam around with smartphones? No, it doesn’t.

Both Ms. Douek and Ms. Ovide are open to breaking up Facebook to keep markets competitive, but they see trustbusting as somewhat beside the point of regulation and democratic oversight. They share this perspective with the tech journalist Kara Swisher, who has called in The Times for a national privacy law as well as increased funding for the agencies already charged with regulating the tech sector.

Dipayan Ghosh, a co-director of the Platform Accountability Project at the Harvard Kennedy School, goes one step further, claiming that Facebook should be treated as a public utility, like water and electric companies. He writes in the Harvard Business Review, “Facebook and firms like it have become natural monopolies that necessitate a novel, stringent set of regulations to obstruct their capitalistic overreaches and protect the public against ingrained economic exploitation.”

Facebook is being vilified

Reports of Facebook’s monopoly are exaggerated, writes Bloomberg’s editorial board. Dominance in a market, it says, should not be mistaken for a lack of competition:

As successful as Facebook is, there’s little stopping other companies from doing things better. In fact, they already are: Nearly all of Facebook’s constituent services — messaging, video sharing and so forth — face competition from apps around the world.

Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, has argued that the company faces a great deal of competition from Chinese tech companies, which would benefit from a policy like Ms. Warren’s. “You could break us up, you could break other tech companies up, but you actually don’t address the underlying issues people are concerned about,” she said in May.

What’s more, writes CNBC’s Matt Rosoff, calls to break up Facebook or regulate it like a public utility ignore the fact that it isn’t strictly necessary to modern life as water and electricity are:

Hughes and others have cited historical precedents such as the government’s breakup of Standard Oil and AT&T as a justification for stricter antitrust regulation against tech giants. But these companies not only had clear monopolies with pricing power that hurt consumers, they also offered products that were vital to the economy. … Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp are only three of many ways people can communicate digitally, and while many people spend hours every week using them, they are replaceable and inessential.

In the end, writes Jim Geraghty for National Review, the fault is not in our tech overlords, but in ourselves: