In the autumn of 2002, Chris Hughes, a teen-ager from a small town in North Carolina, came to Harvard, on financial aid, and began to take courses in the humanities. The next fall, trying to get a spot in a dorm near his close female friends, he joined a rooming group with an acquaintance named Mark Zuckerberg, who was perpetually at work on minor computer schemes. One of them, the Facebook, blew up. Hughes, who was on hand in the dorm—he was the first user after Zuckerberg—had no technical skills, but he was a good writer, and was put in charge of early public relations: figuring out how to sell the site to a few other schools, and suggesting tweaks to make the interface friendlier. This role expanded, along with the site, and, in 2012, Hughes cashed out. He traded his equity—approximately two per cent of the company—for about half a billion dollars.

All that now seems a long time ago. Late last week, the Times published a six-thousand-word essay by Hughes suggesting that Facebook ought to be broken up. “Because Facebook so dominates social networking, it faces no market-based accountability,” Hughes argues. “This means that every time Facebook messes up, we repeat an exhausting pattern: first outrage, then disappointment and, finally, resignation.” Facebook, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, lacks true competition, Hughes writes; Mark Zuckerberg has too much unchecked control over the company’s direction and the content posted by its users. “Mark’s power is unprecedented and un-American,” Hughes says, in a strident turn.

The company retorted with a brisk statement; its communications head (a post that Hughes once held) has issued his own opinion piece; and Zuckerberg, who was in France this weekend, told a broadcaster that the public should “want a company like us to invest billions of dollars a year, like we are, in building up really advanced tools to fight election interference”—a statement so mind-bendingly at odds with experience that it almost seemed a kind of koan. Hughes has trimmed his essay with the ribbons of uxorious good will (“Mark is a good, kind person”), as if to say: This isn’t personal. Still, in media coverage, it has been treated as a watershed—proof that Facebook has defaulted even on friendship. Things have got that bad.

The essay’s true interest lies elsewhere, though: it is personal, albeit in a different sense. The piece follows in the footsteps of Hughes’s book “Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn,” which was published last year (and which I wrote about in this magazine). In the eyes of some of the Fourth Estate, Hughes may be persona non grata, due to his acquisition, controversial management, and benighted sale of The New Republic, earlier this decade. But “Fair Shot” made clear that he is also a much greater anomaly: a super-rich person who takes his super-richness as proof that the economic game is rigged. In his book, Hughes wrote that, “in a winner-take-all world, a small group of people get outsized returns as a result of early actions they take.” His vantage on Facebook is significant not just because he was there when the orchard was planted but because he saw what it took to make the trees bear fruit. In his eyes, the input and the yield don’t match. “I didn’t feel like some kind of genius, and while Mark was smart and talented, so were many of the other people I went to college with,” he wrote.

In his book, Hughes attributed the explosive growth of startups like Facebook—and the skyrocketing value of their stock—to corporate deregulation, reduced tariffs, and the rise of venture capital and other forms of private equity across the seventies and eighties. He picks up this thread in his Times essay, with the suggestion that, for decades, antitrust legislation has been eclipsed by a perverted form of free-market ideology—a growing consensus that “private interests should take precedence over public ones.” As a result of this kind of thinking, he notes, the average size of public companies has tripled. The results “are a decline in entrepreneurship, stalled productivity growth, and higher prices and fewer choices for consumers.”

Hughes sees Facebook’s story within this frame. An important idea in his Times essay is that what he calls Facebook’s unchecked “dominance” is not the result of out-of-bounds decision-making; instead, it is the consequence of a world view that has changed how wealth and business interests flow. (At one point, Hughes recalls a conversation in which the C.E.O. complained about the pressure he was under: “Now that we employ so many people. . . . We just really can’t fail.”) Zuckerberg, he writes, has displayed “nothing more nefarious than the virtuous hustle of a talented entrepreneur.”

If Hughes shifts culpability away from Facebook in particular, it is thus in the service of more general blame. Silicon Valley regards itself as being divided between good- and bad-actor companies. Most people agree that Elizabeth Holmes and her fraudulent firm Theranos were bad actors. (It reveals something about the Valley that this view is not held universally.) Increasingly, tech people trade in the idea that Facebook is a bad actor, too. Hughes is saying the opposite. Facebook was just doing business on the given terms; it became a bad actor simply by meeting targets for success. By implication, other companies that are deemed good actors should alarm us, too. “It’s on our government,” Hughes writes, to undo Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp. He proposes the creation of a new governmental agency expressly for regulating tech.

At a moment when the identity of the putative political left is often defined in terms of narrow doctrines, it is easy to overlook the radicalism of this view—the true sharp edge in Hughes’s essay. He seeks not to disaggregate one company but to reshape the way big business exercises influence in American society. He wants the government to cap a model of corporate growth that, like a blender without a lid, has been jetting wealth up and over the rim of the middle class. Although Hughes’s book was blurbed by Cory Booker, he name-checks Elizabeth Warren twice in his Times essay—a tacit endorsement, and a striking one. Traditionally, equality-minded tech millionaires have favored floor-raising initiatives: these seem to improve the lot of Middle-Class Joe without impeding growth in shareholder-driven businesses. (Such a floor-raising system was, in fact, the main preoccupation of “Fair Shot.”) But breaking up Facebook, or any similarly monopolistic company, is something slightly different: it has the effect of imposing ceilings. This reflects a more sophisticated idea of reform. Since inequality exists between two points—a bottom and a top—a rising floor means little if the giants, corporate and individual, keep growing more quickly. Regulatory ceilings for tech and other powerful industries are a big part of the Warren platform. The idea is not simply to drop a few more nourishing berries in the blender but, for the first time in decades, to replace the lid.

The phrase “regulatory reform” tends to make people’s eyes go glassy. It lacks the human drama of a Brutus blow against one’s former boss and friend. And yet it’s that suggestion, not a specific charge against Facebook, that makes Hughes’s essay bold and—from the mouth of a multimillionaire—a little daring. What he proposes in his essay and his book would affect the way the tech industry runs, changing the flow of investment capital, the strategies for growth, the people to whom the spoils of efficiency go. It would lessen the power of giants and make bonanzas rarer. And it’s only somewhat overdue. Digital commerce may be filled with giants, but, happily for all the rest of us, they aren’t yet too big to fail.