Michael R. Strain, Columnist

Breaking Up Facebook Would Make Things Worse

Privacy, bias, web addiction – how does antitrust action solve any of those problems?

July 1, 2019 at 1:00 PM UTC

Michael R. Strain is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is director of economic policy studies and Arthur F. Burns Scholar in Political Economy at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author of “The American Dream Is Not Dead: (But Populism Could Kill It).”

Getting the message.
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

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The calls to break up Facebook — or at least to consider it — are growing louder by the day. On the left, Elizabeth Warren got on the antitrust bandwagon early with a plan for dismantling the company and other tech giants, while on the right Republican Senator Josh Hawley has mused, “Maybe we’d be better off if Facebook disappeared.” They are just two of many.

But what exactly is this growing chorus of critics trying to solve by threatening to dismember Facebook? The answers show why their solution would be both inappropriate and ineffective.