> but there is no Facebook search

Ouch, don't let Facebook hear you say that :p

They tried so hard to get Search to stick, to the point of trying to juice the numbers by forcing you to go to a result page instead of directly to a group/page/profile in the live results dropdown.

Facebook could easily be told to shed Instagram, WhatsApp and everything else they bought up to dominate the social network space. Individually those companies might not survive, but they could spin them off, as a whole, if the FTC tired to step in.

Google could be asked to do the same with some of their product lines/companies.

It's very unlikely though. These companies have a lot of influence and a lot of power .. and when was the last time the Federal government broke up a company over antitrust violations? It didn't happen with Microsoft .. and for examples of really big monopolies, you'd probably have to go back to the Bell/ATT days.

> It's very unlikely though. These companies have a lot of influence and a lot of power

While that's true, just money and influence aren't sufficient for this. Congress passes laws, but its upto the Executive to interpret it. The lack of breaking up of larger corporations has indeed been due to their significant influence, but I'm interested to see how e.g. a left-learning President like Sanders or Warren would use the powers of the Federal Executive (specifically the Justice Dept) to enforce existing anti-trust laws. Probably the only thorn in their plan would be SCOTUS, and its possible that its current makeup might make it amenable to the influence of corporations (its not clear to me if it will).

Have you considered how standard oil is now ExxonMobil, Chevron, and BP. They did break up but we're hardly in a different place in terms of who controls the market and who has most influence on gov policy globally to keep it that way.

http://2oqz471sa19h3vbwa53m33yj-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-c...

Or how Bell is now ATT and plenty of other useless oligopoly companies?

It’s true they currently have enormous power. But consider how the market would look like and how they would behave, if it were still Standard Oil and ATT.

They can't break up because ads drives something like 80-90% of revenue.