It's not any different than splitting a company up into parts. Historically, that hasn't disrupted the markets as much as it's made sharedholders more money ... because the multiple, smaller entities are more valuable than the whole.

The situation reminds me of when Google bought Motorola[0], and then the Android phone manufacturers pushed for them to sell it again. Which eventually happened. Main difference here would be that it's the government pushing now, instead of (indirect?) competitors (which also happen to be customers).

[0] Good old times, I still have a Moto G3 from back then that works like a charm, except it can't "speak" to the 4G technology that got deployed in the country where I live.

Maybe, but I wonder if the difference in hardware vs. software makes the FB situation a tad more complicated.

Leadership made the push a few years back when Chris Cox left to merge the code bases as much as possible. Do you trust the government to know enough to dictate how that should be undone? You can't, like, just run a "git rebase" to undo years of merging by 10000's of engineers.

Then again, maybe that is just crazy enough to work???

It's not like we haven't broken up companies in the past. It did not cause capitalism to collapse.