Even Facebook’s Co-Founder Thinks It Should Be Broken Up
July 26, 2019
Back when he lived in a Harvard dorm room with Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes helped build Facebook into a social media giant. But now he’s arguing that it’s become too big. Antitrust Superstar Hughes has joined with two leading antitrust academics, Scott Hemphill of New York University and Tim Wu of Columbia University, to meet with the Federal Trade Commission, the Justice Department and state attorneys general to lay out an antitrust argument against Facebook. Yesterday, the F.T.C. announce it would begin its own antitrust investigation into the social media leader, and would also insist that Facebook adopt an independent privacy committee of directors on the company’s board, as part of the fallout of a recent privacy investigation spurred by the 2016 Cambridge Analytica scandal and the resulting compromise of millions of users personal data. It’s Not You It’s… Hughes left Facebook in 2007, and has spent his time since volunteering for President Barack Obama’s campaign and briefly publishing The New Republic. Earlier this year he published an editorial in The New York Times calling for Facebook to be broken up, and while his exact contributions to the antitrust argument are unknown, it’s clear this is a cause that is important to him. While academics have been pushing for antitrust initiatives across a variety of industries, Hughes actions are notable for coming from a former tech executive. Preemptive Buys The argument put forth by the academics is that Facebook has a pattern of buying upstart technology companies before they can mature into genuine threats to their service, pointing to early acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram as proof. In the long run, this means Facebook has less actual competition and, the argument goes, this leads to them charging higher advertising rates and offering customers and increasingly sub-par user experience. -Michael Tedder Photo: Adam Hunger / REUTERS Read More...
Back when he lived in a Harvard dorm room with Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes helped build Facebook into a social media giant. But now he’s arguing that it’s become too big. Antitrust Superstar Hughes has joined with two leading antitrust academics, Scott Hemphill of New York University and Tim Wu of Columbia University, to meet with the Federal Trade Commission, the Justice Department and state attorneys general to lay out an antitrust argument against Facebook. Yesterday, the F.T.C. announce it would begin its own antitrust investigation into the social media leader, and would also insist that Facebook adopt an independent privacy committee of directors on the company’s board, as part of the fallout of a recent privacy investigation spurred by the 2016 Cambridge Analytica scandal and the resulting compromise of millions of users personal data. It’s Not You It’s… Hughes left Facebook in 2007, and has spent his time since volunteering for President Barack Obama’s campaign and briefly publishing The New Republic. Earlier this year he published an editorial in The New York Times calling for Facebook to be broken up, and while his exact contributions to the antitrust argument are unknown, it’s clear this is a cause that is important to him. While academics have been pushing for antitrust initiatives across a variety of industries, Hughes actions are notable for coming from a former tech executive. Preemptive Buys The argument put forth by the academics is that Facebook has a pattern of buying upstart technology companies before they can mature into genuine threats to their service, pointing to early acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram as proof. In the long run, this means Facebook has less actual competition and, the argument goes, this leads to them charging higher advertising rates and offering customers and increasingly sub-par user experience. -Michael Tedder Photo: Adam Hunger / REUTERS
Back when he lived in a Harvard dorm room with Mark Zuckerberg, Chris Hughes helped build Facebook into a social media giant. But now he’s arguing that it’s become too big. Antitrust Superstar Hughes has joined with two leading antitrust academics, Scott Hemphill of New York University and Tim Wu of Columbia University, to meet with the Federal Trade Commission, the Justice Department and state attorneys general to lay out an antitrust argument against Facebook. Yesterday, the F.T.C. announce it would begin its own antitrust investigation into the social media leader, and would also insist that Facebook adopt an independent privacy committee of directors on the company’s board, as part of the fallout of a recent privacy investigation spurred by the 2016 Cambridge Analytica scandal and the resulting compromise of millions of users personal data. It’s Not You It’s… Hughes left Facebook in 2007, and has spent his time since volunteering for President Barack Obama’s campaign and briefly publishing The New Republic. Earlier this year he published an editorial in The New York Times calling for Facebook to be broken up, and while his exact contributions to the antitrust argument are unknown, it’s clear this is a cause that is important to him. While academics have been pushing for antitrust initiatives across a variety of industries, Hughes actions are notable for coming from a former tech executive. Preemptive Buys The argument put forth by the academics is that Facebook has a pattern of buying upstart technology companies before they can mature into genuine threats to their service, pointing to early acquisitions of WhatsApp and Instagram as proof. In the long run, this means Facebook has less actual competition and, the argument goes, this leads to them charging higher advertising rates and offering customers and increasingly sub-par user experience. -Michael Tedder Photo: Adam Hunger / REUTERS
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