With US lawmakers aggressively hunting down tech monopolies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon on several counts of antitrust violations, a recent conversation with Mark Zuckerberg revealed that the CEO founder of Facebook doesn’t think breaking up the company is a viable solution.
“The question that I think we have to grapple with is that breaking up these companies wouldn’t make any of those problems better. The amount that we’re investing in safety and security is greater than the whole revenue of our company was earlier this decade when we went public, so it just would not have been possible to do the things we’re doing at a smaller scale,” said Zuckerberg in a conversation at the Aspen Ideas Festival with a Harward law professor Cass Sunstein.
Zuckerberg expressed that when companies stay “big,” it is easier to deal with any missteps with regards to handling user data. He said that smaller companies such as Twitter and Reddit have to often deal with issues such as election interference and misinformation which isn’t the case with companies such as Facebook.
He said that companies of a larger scale do not tend to encounter misinformation scandals. With a community of 2.38 billion active users per month, he said that Facebook is at a better position to build better security defenses and deploy them in subsidiary platforms of the company such as WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram.
“It’s not the case that if you broke up Facebook into a bunch of pieces, you suddenly wouldn’t have those issues. You would have those issues, you would just be much less equipped to deal with them,” said Zuckerberg.
While Zuckerberg says that Facebook is better left as a ‘big’ entity, or in other words, a monopoly, the House Judiciary Committee doesn’t see so. It had announced earlier this month about launching an antitrust investigation on the tech industry including the big tech companies Apple, Google, Facebook and Amazon.
Nick Clegg, the head of global policy and communications of Facebook urged the policymakers to not break up Facebook but to make policies that can prevent nations such as China and Russia from “writing the new rules of the Internet.”
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