WOULDN'T IT BE EASIER TO TURN MARK ZUCKERBERG INTO A MONEY PUMP?

Under that approach, though, trust-busters and grandstanding attorneys general can't justify their fat salaries.

The U.S. government and 48 states and districts sued Facebook Wednesday, accusing it of abusing its market power in social networking to crush smaller competitors and seeking remedies that could include a forced spinoff of the social network’s Instagram and WhatsApp messaging services.

The landmark antitrust lawsuits, announced by the Federal Trade Commission and New York Attorney General Letitia James, mark the second major government offensive this year against seemingly untouchable tech behemoths. The Justice Department sued Google in October for abusing its dominance in online search and advertising — the government’s most significant attempt to buttress competition since its historic case against Microsoft two decades ago. Amazon and Apple also have been under investigation in Congress and by federal authorities for alleged anticompetitive conduct.

James noted at a press conference that “it’s really critically important that we block this predatory acquisition of companies and that we restore confidence to the market.”

What, precisely, is that predatory acquisition?

The [Federal Trade Commission] said Facebook has engaged in a “a systematic strategy” to eliminate its competition, including by purchasing smaller up-and-coming rivals like Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014. James echoed that in her press conference, saying Facebook “used its monopoly power to crush smaller rivals and snuff out competition, all at the expense of everyday users.”

Those allegations echo monopolization cases of years ago, in which the Standard Oil Trust took advantage of improvements in packaging and logistics to undersell rivals and the Tobacco Trust had the capability of rolling more cigarettes than the adult male population of the time could smoke.  Facebook, on the other hand, aren't closing those other platforms down, they are making those services available, and if there is any control of a bottleneck facility, it might be in the form of the new server complex they're building south of DeKalb.  As long as the information superhighway is some sort of open-access facility, though, it's going to be hard to suppress competition.

North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein, who was on the executive committee of attorneys general conducting the investigation, said the litigation has the potential to alter the communications landscape the way the breakup of AT&T’s local phone service monopoly in the early 1980s did.

“Our hope is to restructure the social networking marketplace in the United States, and right now there’s one player,” Stein told reporters. James said the coalition worked collaboratively with the FTC but noted the attorneys general conducted their investigation separately.

Only one player?  At the moment, a new social networking service called Parler might carry some ideological baggage, as it has become a way for people who don't like the biased fact-checking of Facebook and Twitter to communicate with each other.  "Parler hardly stands alone on the right and far right, joining 4chan, Telegram, Gab, MeWe, Bit Chute and Rumble, for instance, but none have managed much more than a fringe presence on the social media landscape."  There's a price theory problem in there somewhere: does a network monopoly raise its prices until people start substituting, or does it price in such a way as to keep the upstarts out on the fringes?

The incoming administration has enough salt-water antitrust hawks, though, that this case is unlikely to go away.

Joe Biden has said the breakup of Big Tech giants should be seriously considered. He has singled out Facebook’s Zuckerberg for scorn, calling him “a real problem.”

Instagram and WhatsApp are among some 70 companies that Facebook has acquired over the past 15 years. But they are the ones most frequently held up by Facebook critics as properties that should be split off.

Facebook paid $1 billion for Instagram, bolstering the social network’s business a month before its stock went public. At the time, the photo-sharing app had about 30 million users and wasn’t producing any revenue. A few years later, Facebook acquired WhatsApp, an encrypted messaging service, for $19 billion.

Zuckerberg vowed both companies would be run independently, but over the years the services have become increasingly integrated. Users are now able to link accounts and share content across the platforms. Instagram now has more than 1 billion users worldwide. Such integration could make it more difficult to break off the companies.

That is, the big server complex in DeKalb is the same sort of thing as Fisher Body and GM Assembly, making it harder to divest Pontiac from Chevrolet. But couldn't the Biden family deal with Facebook more directly, say, by hunting up some Chinese investors to set up a competing social networking enterprise?