Tim Wu rebuts Zuck's reasons for exempting Facebook from antitrust enforcement

Competition scholar and cyberlawyer Tim "Net Neutrality" Wu's (previously) latest book is The Curse of Bigness: a tight, beautifully argued case for restoring pre-Reagan antitrust approaches.

Wu isn't just good at laying these arguments out in static fashion: if anything, he's even more convincing when he's arguing with the most ardent defenders of monopoly.

Case in point: at a recent appearance as the Aspen Ideas Festival, Wu was asked to rebut Mark Zuckerberg's four-point case for not breaking up Facebook. Zuckerberg argues that:

1. Breaking up Facebook will create a bunch of small companies competing on growth, rather than privacy.

2. If we break up Facebook, they won't have enough money to hire 30,000 people to censor the bad things people post on social media.

3. Breaking up Facebook will allow Chinese tech companies to take over the world.

4. Facebook's acquisitions of companies like Whatsapp and Instagram were not anticompetitive.

Wu's rebuttals are just excellent.

Also, notice in that argument theres a subtle idea where big tech starts promising it's going to do government's work for it: Were going to provide security, we're going to fight Russia, and so forth. First of all, I don't think Facebook has a good track record of protecting this country against foreign attack. So if they're promising more of the same, I don't want to hear it. And I also think anyone who studies systems knows that centralized systems are dangerous, because they offer one big, giant target. Most people who have studied the Russian interference in the last election suggest that one of the problems is that you just had a couple of big targets.