This is me back in my college days. And this is my roommate, Mark. Together, we founded Facebook in 2004. Now, 15 years later, I think Facebook has grown too big and too powerful. Every week brings new headlines about privacy violations, election interference or mental health concerns. I haven’t been at the company in over a decade, but I feel a sense of responsibility to account for the damage done. Americans have the power to right the ship through government action. We need new regulations. It’s time to break up Facebook. The early days of Facebook tell a classic American story of innovation and entrepreneurship. From our college dorm room, we started a little social network for our friends that exploded in popularity and connected the world. Mark’s hustle in those early years made it possible for Facebook to dominate our rivals like Friendster, MySpace, Tumblr and many others. These competitors made us better. And then we beat them out. This is how it’s supposed to work in America. Hard work leads to economic success. You start a small business and compete on the merits to provide a better product. Today, nearly three billion people use Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, and they’re all owned and controlled by the same company. Of every dollar spent buying ads on social media, $0.84 goes to Facebook. It’s now worth over half a trillion dollars. That’s roughly the size of the G.D.P. of the bottom 65 countries in the world — combined. It’s not just that Facebook is a really big social network. It’s everything. When a single company dominates any market, they become susceptible to abusing their power. Social networking is like most other American industries. There used to be plenty of healthy competition. But now many industries are controlled by just one or two companies. Companies often create an illusion of choice. You think there are hundreds of beer brands out there, but they’re all made by one or two companies. Why is this a problem? Well, when companies get too big, they get sloppy and careless, and that leads to things like poor privacy practices, enabling foreign actors to meddle in elections, the spread of violent rhetoric, fake news and the unbounded drive to capture more of our data and attention. I often hear people say, “I’m shutting down my Facebook account. Thank God for Instagram,” not realizing that Instagram is owned by Facebook. People are powerless in this situation because there’s nowhere else to go. Monopolies stifle innovation. Facebook snatches up competitors by buying them before they get too big. Or, by copying their innovations. Despite all the money and hype being poured into new startups, there hasn’t been a single major social media platform launched since 2011. The harm goes beyond he economy though, it goes to democracy itself. When companies become empires, people are stripped of power. Facebook’s employees write complex rules called algorithms that decide what you see in your News Feed. Facebook can decide what messages get delivered and which don’t. And what exactly makes for violent or inappropriate content. Even Mark himself has said that he and the Facebook team have too much power over speech. Facebook does have a board of directors. But Mark owns the majority of the shares. Unlike the leader of a democracy there are no checks and balances on Facebook. Mark has no boss, and he cannot be fired. Listen, it’d be great if Mark can fix this himself. But this, ironically, is a problem he cannot solve. We need the government to intervene with two steps. First, the Facebook empire needs to be broken up. America’s regulated corporate empires before, and we can do it again. This isn’t unprecedented and surprisingly, it often boosts the value of these companies in the long run. The Federal Trade Commission can force Facebook to unwind its acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram. Then we’ll see real competition around social media and digital messaging. Breaking up Facebook isn’t a punishment for its economic success. It’s a way to guarantee that other new companies can compete. We also need a new government agency to protect Americans from the overreach of Facebook and other companies like it. Think about it. We don’t trust airlines or pharmaceutical companies to regulate themselves. We shouldn’t trust social media companies either. We need basic privacy protections and the ability for people to move their data around as they please. Right now Facebook makes free speech decisions on its own with little accountability. Instead, we need government to set guidelines, not Facebook employees in Menlo Park. I don’t think Mark’s a bad guy and I’ve made this decision to speak out because I feel a sense of responsibility for what Facebook has become. And to be honest, I’m angry that Mark’s obsession with growth led him to sacrifice security for clicks. I think we all want to live in a country where David can take on Goliath, where a kid with a smart idea in a dorm room can start a billion- dollar company. We’ve strayed from that ideal, and breaking up and regulating Facebook will help put us back on that path.<doc-sep>One of Facebook's co-founders has called for the social network to be broken up to rein in Mark Zuckerberg's “staggering” power. Chris Hughes, who co-founded Facebook in 2004 and shared a dorm room at Harvard University with Zuckerberg, said the company had grown into an all-powerful monopoly that lacked true rivals. Zuckerberg had “created a leviathan that crowds out entrepreneurship and restricts consumer choice”, he said. Facebook owns the largest social network with more than 2 billion users across the world. It also owns WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram, each used by more than 1 billion people. Facebook’s acquisition of potential rivals and the copying of key features of others had left consumers with no real alternative to using Facebook’s apps to communicate online, Hughes claimed. Writing in the New York Times, he warned that his biggest concern was the lack of oversight and the concentration of power over speech and politics in the hands of his former dorm-mate. “It’s been 15 years since I co-founded Facebook at Harvard, and I haven’t worked at the company in a decade," he said. "But I feel a sense of anger and responsibility.”<doc-sep>The growing chorus calling for Facebook’s breakup just added a big voice: Chris Hughes, one of the social media giant’s co-founders and Mark Zuckerberg’s college roommate. In an op-ed published in the New York Times on Thursday, Hughes laid out a scathing case for the government to crack down on Facebook and scale back Zuckerberg’s power. He argued that regulators should unwind the company’s acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram, create space for more competition, and enact new privacy legislation that restricts what data Facebook can collect in the United States. Hughes said that while he doesn’t believe Zuckerberg has nefarious intentions, the power he’s amassed at the helm of Facebook is “unprecedented and un-American.” “Facebook isn’t afraid of a few more rules,” Hughes wrote. “It’s afraid of an antitrust case and the kind of accountability that real government oversight would bring.” Facebook has come under increasing scrutiny amid a cascade of scandals that at times can seem never-ending. Calls for the company to be broken up and face stricter regulation have increased, including some of the loudest from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), a progressive firebrand and 2020 presidential candidate. Hughes joining the push to break up Facebook is huge: He was at the company at its infancy and helped set in motion many of the events that would ultimately make it so powerful. While he left Facebook in 2008 to work on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, his work is still a part of its DNA. “It’s been 15 years since I co-founded Facebook at Harvard, and I haven’t worked at the company in a decade,” he wrote. “But I feel a sense of anger and responsibility.” Hughes’s push goes beyond the pages of the Times — he also gave a long interview with NPR on Thursday morning. He knows that his calls to winnow Facebook are a big deal, and he wants to make sure his voice is heard. Hughes lays out how Facebook has acquired, squashed, and copied competition In the Times op-ed, Hughes makes the case that Facebook has devised a number of ways to lock out competition, whether by acquiring potential rivals, copying them, or blocking them. He calls the Federal Trade Commission’s approval of Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp its “biggest mistake” and argues Facebook should immediately be forced to spin them off into two separate independent entities. “Until recently, WhatsApp and Instagram were administered as independent platforms inside the parent company, so that should make the process easier,” Hughes wrote. “But time is of the essence: Facebook is working quickly to integrate the three, which would make it harder for the FTC to split them up.” Facebook this year said it was moving toward integrating its messaging services. But not all of Facebook’s strategies when it comes to competitors entail acquisitions. It also blocks them or prioritizes its products over theirs. Hughes cites reports that Facebook’s News Feed algorithm favored videos created on its platform over videos from YouTube and Vimeo. It blocked Twitter’s Vine, a six-second video network, from hosting a tool that would let users search for their friends on Facebook. Vine eventually shuttered. And in the case of Snapchat, which Facebook reportedly tried to buy in 2013, Facebook launched Stories, a blatant copy of Snapchat’s most popular and iconic feature. Hughes explains what this, in his mind, has meant for competition: As a result of all this, would-be competitors can’t raise the money to take on Facebook. Investors realize that if a company gets traction, Facebook will copy its innovations, shut it down or acquire it for a relatively modest sum. So despite an extended economic expansion, increasing interest in high-tech start-ups, an explosion of venture capital and growing public distaste for Facebook, no major social networking company has been founded since the fall of 2011. As markets become more concentrated, the number of new start-up businesses declines. This holds true in other high-tech areas dominated by single companies, like search (controlled by Google) and e-commerce (taken over by Amazon). Meanwhile, there has been plenty of innovation in areas where there is no monopolistic domination, such as in workplace productivity (Slack, Trello, Asana), urban transportation (Lyft, Uber, Lime, Bird) and cryptocurrency exchanges (Ripple, Coinbase, Circle). Hughes sees government as the remedy Hughes leans heavily into the idea that the US government should step in, not only with regulators upping antitrust enforcement but also with Congress laying out new ground rules for the internet, privacy, and even speech. Zuckerberg himself has called for increased regulation, writing in a recent Washington Post op-ed that it’s time for the government to update the rules for the internet. Hughes says he doesn’t think Zuckerberg’s regulation proposals have been made in bad faith, but he does see them as an “attempt to head off the argument that regulators need to go further and break up the company.” He argues that the FTC’s potential $3 billion to $5 billion fine over Facebook’s handling of user data and privacy violations is “not enough” and says that the FTC and Justice Department should just unwind the WhatsApp and Instagram acquisitions. He also says that regulators should ban future acquisitions by Facebook for several years. “The F.T.C. should have blocked these mergers, but it’s not too late to act,” he wrote. “There is precedent for correcting bad decisions — as recently as 2009, Whole Foods settled antitrust complaints by selling off the Wild Oats brand and stores that it had bought a few years earlier.” An aggressive case against Facebook could also have secondary effects on Google and Amazon and make them reconsider their practices with regard to acquisitions. Hughes writes that the US should enact digital privacy legislation, along the lines what Europe did with the General Data Protection Regulation, in place since May 2018. Perhaps most interestingly, he proposes that the government create guidelines for acceptable speech on social media — given the place of free speech and the First Amendment in the US, that’s a big deal, which he acknowledges: This idea may seem un-American — we would never stand for a government agency censoring speech. But we already have limits on yelling “fire” in a crowded theater, child pornography, speech intended to provoke violence and false statements to manipulate stock prices. We will have to create similar standards that tech companies can use. These standards should of course be subject to the review of the courts, just as any other limits on speech are. But there is no constitutional right to harass others or live-stream violence. Such a maneuver by the government could have big implications when it comes to free speech on the internet, platform responsibility for it, and the ongoing debate surrounding whether Facebook and others are platforms or publishers. Hughes seems to put a lot of faith in the US government to be able to act in the right way on these measures, and whether it can is an open question. But the situation we’re in right now — where one man, Mark Zuckerberg, has so much control, rather than elected officials — has proven itself to be damaging, argues Hughes. Nick Clegg, head of global affairs and communications at Facebook, said in a statement responding to the op-ed that the company “accepts that with success comes accountability,” but that doesn’t entail being broken up. “Accountability of tech companies can only be achieved through the painstaking introduction of new rules for the internet,” he said. Why this? Why now? We don’t know. Hughes has been out of Facebook for a while and taken on a number of projects since then, including working on the Obama campaign, buying (and then selling) the New Republic, and serving as co-chair of the Economic Security Project, a network dedicated to fostering discussions about guaranteed income. He liquidated his Facebook shares in 2012 and says he no longer invests directly in any social media companies. Forbes lists Hughes’s net worth as $430 million as of December 2016. So why is he speaking out now? It’s unclear.<doc-sep>
Facebook’s co-founder Chris Hughes and more say it’s time to break up the company. We break down the case for and against. New York Times: "Opinion: It’s Time to Break Up Facebook" — "The last time I saw Mark Zuckerberg was in the summer of 2017, several months before the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke. We met at Facebook’s Menlo Park, Calif., office and drove to his house, in a quiet, leafy neighborhood. We spent an hour or two together while his toddler daughter cruised around. We talked politics mostly, a little about Facebook, a bit about our families. When the shadows grew long, I had to head out. I hugged his wife, Priscilla, and said goodbye to Mark. "Since then, Mark’s personal reputation and the reputation of Facebook have taken a nose-dive. The company’s mistakes — the sloppy privacy practices that dropped tens of millions of users’ data into a political consulting firm’s lap; the slow response to Russian agents, violent rhetoric and fake news; and the unbounded drive to capture ever more of our time and attention — dominate the headlines. It’s been 15 years since I co-founded Facebook at Harvard, and I haven’t worked at the company in a decade. But I feel a sense of anger and responsibility." CNBC: "Facebook is not a monopoly, and breaking it up would defy logic and set a bad precedent" — "Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes laid out his arguments for breaking up the company in a lengthy op-ed for The New York Times on Thursday. "The essence of his argument seems to be that a single person, Mark Zuckerberg, has too much control over the communications platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, that billions of people use. Therefore, the government should force Facebook to divest its other communications platforms and create a new agency to regulate tech companies, particularly around privacy. "The break-up argument is compelling if you’re predisposed to dislike Zuckerberg and Facebook after the last few years of blunders related to user data and misinformation, and Facebook’s often tone-deaf or seemingly indifferent responses to these incidents. (Zuckerberg didn’t do himself any favors by cracking an awkward joke about his company’s privacy troubles in his speech at a company conference last week.) "It’s also illogical, difficult and a waste of time." Forbes: "Opinion: Why Breaking Up Facebook Doesn't Solve Our Most Pressing Social Media Problem" — "This week, Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, delivered a dramatic and dire diagnosis of threats his former company poses to our society. Much of his assessment is accurate and troubling. Speaking as an insider, he provides a compelling account of just how powerful Facebook has become and the dangers associated with its dominance. Yet the prescription he proposes—breaking up the company—doesn’t address what is perhaps the most important aspect of the problem—namely, the flood of politically divisive disinformation and harmful content online. "In his 5,500 word essay, Hughes vividly captures Mark Zuckerberg’s driving ambition to dominate Facebook’s rivals and the company’s relentless pursuit of growth, often without adequate attention to the well-being of the larger society. Hughes chides the U.S. government for allowing Facebook to acquire Instagram and WhatsApp and recommends that Facebook be broken up on antitrust grounds. "But let’s assume that the government takes the action Hughes proposes and forces Facebook to divest itself of WhatsApp and Instagram. Then what? Will this stop the Russians from meddling in our 2020 elections and continuing to misuse the internet to further polarize our politics? Will it prevent authoritarian governments elsewhere from deploying the internet to foment ethnic or religious tensions within their own countries? Will it avoid a recurrence of the recent glorification of extremist violence after the Christchurch mosque attacks, with thousands of people posting images of the massacre? And finally, will it prevent governments, both democratic and non-democratic, from imposing content regulations that will balkanize the internet and deny open public debate on politically contentious issues?" Fast Company: "Zuck: Don’t break up Facebook, because we can protect you from the threat our platform enables" — "After the op-ed was published, Facebook released a small statement arguing that breaking up Facebook won’t lead to more accountability—only passing new rules for the internet can solve problems Facebook’s platform propagates. The statement itself seemed like an obvious dodge, as it didn’t address the crux of Hughes’ argument: that one man—Mark Zuckerberg—has an inordinate amount of power over the most influential platform to ever exist. "Over the weekend, Zuckerberg himself chimed in on Hughes’ op-ed.