Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes said the company should be broken up. Photo / AP
Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes said the company should be broken up. Photo / AP
Facebook pushed back today after Chris Hughes, a billionaire co-founder of the company, argued in a New York Times op-ed essay that the company should be broken up and regulated.
"Facebook accepts that with success comes accountability," Nick Clegg, Facebook's vice president of global affairs and communication, wrote in astatement. "But you don't enforce accountability by calling for the breakup of a successful American company."
The statement followed a lengthy op-ed by Hughes published online today arguing that the social media giant be subjected to extensive government oversight and separated into multiple companies, notably by spinning off the photo-sharing app Instagram and the messenger service WhatsApp.
Hughes co-founded Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg 15 years ago when they were undergraduates at Harvard. He left the company in 2007 to work with the Obama campaign.
"The government must hold Mark accountable," Hughes wrote in the 5,800-word column arguing that the social media giant has grown far too powerful.
"From our earliest days, Mark used the word 'domination' to describe our ambitions, with no hint of irony or humility," he wrote. "Over a decade later, Facebook has earned the prize of domination. It is worth half a trillion dollars and commands, by my estimate, more than 80 per cent of the world's social networking revenue. It is a powerful monopoly, eclipsing all of its rivals and erasing competition from the social networking category."
Though others have made similar arguments over the past year, the essay by a longtime confidant of Zuckerberg set off a firestorm on communication platforms owned by Facebook and others, given Hughes' role in the start of the company and his once close-knit relationship with Zuckerberg.
Chris Hughes was a co-founder of Facebook with Mark Zuckerberg 15 years ago. He left the company in 2007. Photo / Damon Winter, The New York Times
Senator Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., who has made the breakup of Facebook, Google and Amazon a cornerstone of her presidential campaign, expressed her support on Twitter and on Medium.
"Weak antitrust enforcement has led to a dramatic reduction in competition and innovation in the tech sector," she wrote. "Venture capitalists are now hesitant to fund new startups to compete with these big tech companies because it's so easy for the big companies to either snap up growing competitors or drive them out of business."
Hughes wrote that the Federal Trade Commission and Justice Department "should enforce antitrust laws by undoing the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions and banning future acquisitions for several years."
He called the decision to allow Facebook to buy these two major competitors "the FTC's biggest mistake."
He also argued that simply breaking up Facebook would not be sufficient. "We need a new agency, empowered by Congress to regulate tech companies," he wrote and argued that "its first mandate should be to protect privacy."
Facebook aside, other responses to the piece fell into a few camps. While some called it a smart and crucial addition to the debate, others said Hughes' argument rang hollow because he had made hundreds of millions of dollars from Facebook. Others said that separating Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp would not fix the core issues posed by having so much power over the flow of information in the hands of just a few tech companies. And others said that if people don't like how Facebook behaves, they should simply quit Facebook.
