Advocacy Groups Are Pushing The FTC To Break Up Facebook (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader quotes the Verge: Advocacy groups are calling for Facebook to be broken up as a result of its Cambridge Analytica scandal, subsequent privacy violations, and repeated consumer data breaches. Groups like Open Market Institute, Color of Change, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center wrote to the Federal Trade Commission Thursday requesting a major government intervention into how Facebook operates. The letter outlined several moves the FTC could take, including a multibillion-dollar fine, reforming the company's hiring practices, and most importantly, breaking up one of the most powerful social media companies for abusing its market position...

According to organizations like Open Market Institute and Color of Change, Facebook should be required to give up $2 billion and divest ownership of Instagram and WhatsApp for failing to protect user data on those platforms as well. "Given that Facebook's violations are so numerous in scale, severe in nature, impactful for such a large portion of the American public and central to the company's business model, and given the company's massive size and influence over American consumers," the letter reads, "penalties and remedies that go far beyond the Commission's recent actions are called for."

Comments

Ad Network / Consumer Data is key

[Etcetera]

For any breakup of Google or Facebook, the FTC should focus on splitting all the ad networks back out, and enforcing data escrow and consumer protection laws (a la consumer research companies like credit bureaus are now). DOJ can focus on un-doing the Instagram/WhatsApp mergers, etc. (For Google, FTC might be able to split Chrome and Chrome OS from the site, and Play Services from Android.

Next up: Amazon and its vertical commerce infrastructure monopoly.

Hopefully, after that point, the public cloud companies will agree to divestiture of those into non-vendor-lock-in utils. Maybe.

I don't think this would work

[Jeremi]

Because Facebook is the poster-child for economies of scale -- people find it useful precisely because all their friends and relatives are on it.

So imagine that a court orders Facebook to split into two separate companies, we'll call them BabyBookA and BabyBookB. Each of these BabyBooks inherits half of Facebook's customer base.

No matter how the customer base gets split up, that is going to leave a lot of people cut off from some of their Facebook friends. So if they want to keep in touch with those friends, they are either going to have to create a redundant account on "the other" BabyBook service, and then check both accounts every hour, for the rest of their lives... or they are going to encourage their friends to move over to "their" service instead, so they can all be together again.

This might work for a short while, but eventually one of the two BabyBooks will become sufficiently larger than the other, at which the smaller one might as well call itself MySpace -- it will wither away and die from lack of users, because with fewer users it's less useful than the larger one, causing a downward spiral.

And then we're back to square one, with a single giant monopoly monopolizing the Facebook-style social-media market.

Re:I don't think this would work

[fafalone]

Damn I know reading the article is against our principles here, but at least read the summary. They're talking about the other networks Facebook owns, like Instagram, being split off, not turning FB itself into smaller FBs.

Re:The FTC CAN NOT break up a company

[ShanghaiBill]

Only the courts, or congress can break up a company.

No, only the courts can break up a company. Congress has no authority to do that, and it is specially banned from doing so in Article I, Section 9, paragraph 3 of the Constitution which prohibits any bill of attainder.

Also, "breaking up a company" can only be done if a company is declared a monopoly. There is no legal basis for using a breakup as punishment for leaking data or any other crime.