Facebook has now become one of the largest companies in the world. The story of its creation has become famous and the subject of a movie called “The Social Network.” Mark Zuckerberg was a student at Harvard when he and several other students came up with the idea for what is now Facebook. Zuckerberg’s roommate at the time was named Chris Hughes. He was one of the people who was integral in the development of Facebook when it was getting off the ground. Hughes has not been a part of the company since 2007. However, he now feels that the company has become much too big and should be broken up.
Hughes is certainly not the only person who feels that way. Senator Elizabeth Warren has been using the breakup of big tech companies as one of her key platform issues during her presidential campaign. However, the fact that Hughes was one of the people who helped to create the company has given his calls to break it up a lot of publicity. Hughes has been having meetings with top politicians and people in government to give them ideas about how to successfully break up a company that now has more than 2.4 billion people using it around the world.
Why does Hughes think that the time has come to make Facebook smaller? It comes down to the fact that Facebook bought up many smaller companies that could have potentially posed a threat to it. One of the most famous examples of this is Instagram. The photo sharing app was created for the Apple iPhone. Facebook bought it for $1 billion. That was one of the best bargains in the history of business. Instagram is now one of the most visited sites and most popular apps on the planet.
Hughes feels that there needs to be room for new developers to create sites and apps without the threat of being gobbled up by the behemoth known as Facebook. There is no question that it will take a long time to break up a company that has become so integrated into the fabric of the Internet. Hughes thinks that Facebook also owning Instagram and WhatsApp make it a monopoly. Other monopolies like Standard Oil and AT&T have been broken up in the past. So this has been done before. Many lawmakers will need to get on board for it to happen.
Dil Bole Oberoi
