> In this case, it's hard to see the problem with facebook being broken up. Who, exactly, loses?

No one except Zuckerberg, I'd think.

However, it raises an interesting question: how exactly would you break up an entity like facebook? It doesn't seem like a business that would lend itself to subdivision.

Just as Microsoft was required to open up its Win32 APIs, one possible remedy here would be for Facebook to be forced to allow users to receive/make posts from/to their Facebook friends on any competing site, and allow people to log into those competing sites using their Facebook accounts (using a single sign-on system like OpenID Connect / OAuth 2.0).

That way each competitor could offer its own interface and algorithm for filtering people's feeds, and show their own ads (or offer a competing business model). If users opted to have their posts on the competing site automatically sent to Facebook (so their Facebook-only friends could still see them) then Facebook would be free to data-mine those posts still.

The next question is, could someone code a browser extension or other tool which makes this possible without needing any changes from Facebook's side? If it would break the Facebook terms of service, would someone crowd-fund the anti-trust lawsuit to override those terms?

People have tried to just "code around" these centralization issues, but Facebook/Google have a lot of developers that can put a lot of time into identifying/rate-limiting/blocking unauthorized use of their API's. Nothing has been able to get past the "but does it work almost all the time" barrier that those engineering efforts put in the way to technically circumventing centralizaiton.

Geographically, like a phone network.

Then mandate interoperability with an open standard, like a phone network.

> Geographically, like a phone network.

I don't think that makes much sense for breaking up something like Facebook.

Unlike a phone network, Facebook's service is not rooted in geography. Yes, it's users have homes and geographic locations, but those are just arbitrary account attributes, just like their name or if they like the Denver Broncos. You might as well have one post-breakup company start out with all the A-M accounts and the other the N-Z accounts.

If you had to divide up the users between N successor companies, I'd probably be best to do it based on friend-graph connectivity, with mandated interoperability between them. That might make the successors sticky enough to survive.

There's a high correlation between geography and social graph, while the part of the social graph that gets "cut" will give an incentive to make interoperability work, as people will care about it.

So your premise is true(ish), but the conclusion can't be drawn from it (and your comparison falls apart) because we don't need strict dependency on geography, only a (relatively strong) correlation.

Why not make an open soure alternative? How much do you hear about blogger.com and livejournal after Wordpress came out? How much do you hear about AOL after the Web came out?

They've already tried. But the biggest thing about social networks is that they really only work if the people you want to be connected to are there. Diaspora was an open source social network, and it went nowhere. Ello was supposed to be a social network that didn't sell your data, and they ended up not being able to make it as a social network. They're still around, but they've pivoted a little.

Because there are open source alternatives. Nobody uses them. Nobody used google plus, and that was a realistic replacement.

Oh yeah? Please list the top 3 alternatives which are open source.

GNU Social, Diaspora, and Friendica

The consumers, no? They get inferior products. Who wins? Seems like its just people who want a piece of the pie, and do they deserve it? Doesn't seem like it.

I'd argue Facebook's purchase and integration of other products is what made them inferior.... How exactly does facebook owning instagram and facebook help the consumer? They didn't need to buy it to integrate it into feeds, and that's not how most people consumed instagram anyway.

Hell, the main benefit I see to instagram is that their geotagging improved immensely.

How is it worse for the consumer, though? I don't see how, under capitalism, its even possible for an abusive company to maintain a strong position.

> I don't see how, under capitalism, its even possible for an abusive company to maintain a strong position.

Network effects. Together everyone hates it; individually, there is nowhere else for people to go without losing the majority of your social network. Facebook has people; its software is utterly irrelevant to why people use it.

There's nothing about that action which would imply that consumers would get inferior products.