Should companies who have gotten too big be broken up?

Yes, and we do a piss poor job of this.

Only if they possess a monopoly on the market.

Absolutely. Don’t expect this to happen in the next 4 years though.

Maybe countries too?

Having a monopoly is illegal in this country, with good reason.
It has nothing to do with “how big” a company becomes.

@Dutchess_III I have two problems thoughts with monopolies. Like the game it is no fun to start when everyone else owns all of the land at the start of play. There would be no incentive to play by the rules and to work hard.

Second the whole idea of euntrapenrship is to win the game with the most money, with the freedom to work by one’s own rules, which includes a monopoly. You can would lose motivation to become rich if you there is a cap on on power.

Monopoly board game is only fun If you are winning.

OK. A monopoly means no one else can sell what you’re selling. In real life that is bad. That is why it’s illegal.
In a board game it is fun.

For me it’s hard to argue that Facebook has any kind of monopoly while Twitter is around.

YES!!! I was around in the late 60’s when AT&T was broken up into a ton of different companies. People were screaming & gnashing their teeth at the thought of breaking up our main communication organization. When the main portion of AT&T was snapped off, it remained AT&T but much smaller & other companies such as Southern Bell, South Central Bell, Chesapeake & Potomac, & others came into existence. Depending on the region, all that seemed to happen was that the service remained the same…ONLY the name changed.

Over a period of time, other phone services arose out of the ashes & suddenly we had some competition!!! Prices began to go down just a little, but still down, The one thing that we didn’t have was one company deciding how the entire country was allowed to communicate & how much they were allowed to charge. When there is NO competition, you are stuck with what you have, so you grumble but accept that there is little to nothing that you can do about it.

Pretty much the same thing has been happening with the mobile communication companies. Some became too big, so now they are being pared back down to size!!!

I don’t do Facebook & I’ve NEVER been on Instagram nor WhatsApp, so I have NO dog in this fight!!! Objectively speaking, I think that FB has grown way too large & arrogant. I can see the possibilities of something better coming out of this!!!

Social media inspires a lot of rage boners, but I do question why the attention is always on Silicon Valley companies and not on, say, Comcast and Disney. That said, I don’t support breaking up companies simply because they’re “too big”. There has to be genuine monopolistic behavior. And maybe Facebook has met that criteria. We shall see.

It’s not always ob silicon valley. When CellOne went to sell out to USCellular, they had to sell to Altell first (we were A side, Altell was our arch enemy on the B side,) and from there it made it to USCellular. It had some convoluted thing to do with monopoly laws.

@Demosthenes If they’re big enough to start buying up or running over the competition then it’s time.

@LadyMarissa

I don’t know, I’ve never seen any real competition between phone companies. Not traditional phone companies anyway (cell phones are a bit different). Ma Bell may have been broken up, but landline phone carriers are still granted legal monopolies over their service areas.

No, they aren’t @Darth_Algar. We have at least 3, maybe 4 carriers in town.

See my post above where I said ”It’s not always silicon valley. When CellOne went to sell out to USCellular, they had to sell to Altell first (we were A side, Altell was our arch enemy on the B side, our biggest competitor,) and from there it made it to USCellular. It had some convoluted thing to do with monopoly laws.”

@Dutchess_III

See my post where I said “traditional” and “landline”.