I largely agree with the sentiment in this article, despite not really liking Facebook or using it too much. Does anyone here in HN favor a FB breakup, whatever that would look like, and why?
Regulation will be captured by Facebook to cement their monopoly position.
The only antidote to this is competition- and that means not only breaking facebook into separate companies, but also prohibiting them from buying new entrants into the market.
In which line of business does google have a monopoly?
The problem arises when those who are addicted to the services get to vote in elections. At that point, the damage escapes the honeypot and can influence others in meaningful ways.
Breaking them up helps solve this by preventing any one company from essentially taking over the world’s democracies by steering allowable debate and therefore votes. It also distributes the attack surface area for other countries who want to influence elections.
I absolutely believe undoing the Instagram merger and stopping Facebook from copying the features of other networks to kill them would help accomplish this objective.
At that point regulation becomes a necessity to safeguard citizen's rights and freedoms. Such regulation includes more stringent checks on the permissiveness of corporate takeovers by the behemoth (again, this is nothing revolutionary, it is common in all capitalist democracies).
Start with breaking out Whatsapp and Instagram. Those mergers should never have been approved. Either that, or force the platform to be open to third party clients and introduce a fairly priced way to use those services without paying with your data.