Facebook Inc quickly rejected a call from co-founder Chris Hughes on Thursday to split the world's largest social media company in three, while lawmakers urged the U.S. Justice Department to launch an antitrust investigation. Facebook has been under scrutiny from regulators around the world over data sharing practices as well as hate speech and misinformation on its networks. Some U.S. lawmakers have also pushed for action to break up big tech companies as well as federal privacy regulation.
"We are a nation with a tradition of reining in monopolies, no matter how well intentioned the leaders of these companies may be. Mark's power is unprecedented and un-American," Hughes, a former college roommate of Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, wrote https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/opinion/sunday/chris-hughes-facebook-zuckerberg.html in a lengthy New York Times opinion piece.
Facebook's social network has more than 2 billion users across the world. It also owns WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram, each used by more than 1 billion people. Facebook bought Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014.
Facebook rejected Hughes' call for WhatsApp and Instagram to be made into separate companies, and said the focus should instead be on regulating the internet. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg will be in Paris on Friday to meet with French President Emmanuel Macron to discuss internet regulation.
"Facebook accepts that with success comes accountability. But you don't enforce accountability by calling for the break up of a successful American company," Facebook spokesman Nick Clegg said in a statement. "Accountability of tech companies can only be achieved through the painstaking introduction of new rules for the internet. That is exactly what Mark Zuckerberg has called for."
US Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat, told CNBC he thinks Facebook needs to be broken up and that the Justice Department's antitrust division needs to begin an investigation. Hughes co-founded Facebook in 2004 at Harvard with Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz. He left Facebook in 2007 and went to work for presidential candidate Barack Obama, and has said in a LinkedIn post https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-made-half-billion-dollars-three-years-work-heres-what-chris-hughes that he made half a billion dollars for his three years of work.
"It's been 15 years since I co-founded Facebook at Harvard, and I haven't worked at the company in a decade. But I feel a sense of anger and responsibility," Hughes said in the New York Times piece. In one of a number of security and privacy scandals to hit the company, Facebook is accused of inappropriately sharing information belonging to 87 million users with the now-defunct British political consulting firm Cambridge Analytica. The company has been in advanced talks with the US Federal Trade Commission to settle a year-old investigation and said last month it expected to spend between $3 billion and $5 billion on a penalty.
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