Breaking Up Facebook Isn’t Enough
In an explosive opinion piece published today in The New York Times, Chris Hughes, a Facebook co-founder and Mark Zuckerberg’s former Harvard roommate, called for the government to break up the social-media company. “I haven’t worked at the company in a decade,” Hughes wrote, “But I feel a sense of anger and responsibility.”
[Read: What Facebook could have been]
That’s a nice gesture, and Hughes, now a co-founder of a basic-income collective, puts forth some worthy ideas that tech entrepreneurs, even lapsed ones, rarely embrace. But the gesture is still more rhetorical than actionable, and it doesn’t go nearly far enough into specifics about how to dismantle a company he calls a dangerous monopoly.
It probably makes sense to break up Facebook. Splitting off two of its subsidiaries, Instagram and WhatsApp, would be a reasonable first step toward that end, and Hughes’s rationale for doing so also makes sense. Billions of people now use these services, and Facebook has made motions that into its other products. (That process has already been under way for some time, in Instagram.)
