Yahoo Finance 'It's time to break up Facebook' to curb Mark Zuckerberg's power, says social network's co-founder
One of Facebook's co-founders has called for the social network to be broken up to rein in Mark Zuckerberg's “staggering” power.
Chris Hughes, who co-founded Facebook in 2004 and shared a dorm room at Harvard University with Zuckerberg, said the company had grown into an all-powerful monopoly that lacked true rivals.
Zuckerberg had “created a leviathan that crowds out entrepreneurship and restricts consumer choice”, he said.
Facebook owns the largest social network with more than 2 billion users across the world. It also owns WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram, each used by more than 1 billion people.
Facebook’s acquisition of potential rivals and the copying of key features of others had left consumers with no real alternative to using Facebook’s apps to communicate online, Hughes claimed.
Writing in the New York Times, he warned that his biggest concern was the lack of oversight and the concentration of power over speech and politics in the hands of his former dorm-mate.
“It’s been 15 years since I co-founded Facebook at Harvard, and I haven’t worked at the company in a decade," he said. "But I feel a sense of anger and responsibility.”
He added that Zuckerberg had an endless entrepreneurial drive for “domination” that had not been checked.
“He needs to have some check on his power,” Hughes said. “The American government needs to do two things: break up Facebook’s monopoly and regulate the company to make it more accountable to the American people.”
"Mark is a good, kind person. But I'm angry that his focus on growth led him to sacrifice security and civility for clicks.
"And I'm worried that Mark has surrounded himself with a team that reinforces his beliefs instead of challenging them."
Hughes quit Facebook in 2007 to join Barack Obama's 2008 campaign for President. He is reported to have made around $430m from his stake in Facebook.
The call to break up Facebook comes as the social network makes greater efforts to combine its biggest apps.
Facebook has said it plans to merge messaging from its Messenger app, WhatsApp and Instagram so users on different apps can communicate.
In a statement responding to Hughes, Facebook's VP of Global Affairs and Communications Nick Clegg said: "Facebook accepts that with success comes accountability. But you don't enforce accountability by calling for the breakup of a successful American company. Accountability of tech companies can only be achieved through the painstaking introduction of new rules for the internet."
However, Facebook faces renewed regulatory pressure in the US and Europe. US Democratic president frontrunner Elizabeth Warren has led calls for a break up of the biggest US technology companies. The US Federal Trade Commission, meanwhile, is lining up what could be a $5bn for Facebook over a privacy scandal.
French President Emmanuel Macron and Facebook Zuckerberg are meeting in Paris on Friday, one year after the social media and advertising company pledged to open its doors and algorithms to a government team to keep online hate speech in check.
The meeting with Macron is part of Zuckerberg’s work “to discuss future regulation of the internet” with leaders, the company said, including “the co-regulation pilot” decided last year with French authorities.
