Editorial: Facebook is too big. Breaking it up is just part of the solution

The Federal Trade Commission and the attorneys general of 46 states filed lawsuits Wednesday seeking what amounted to a do-over on Facebook — the chance to reject two acquisitions that helped make the social network the behemoth it is today. Among other noxious pursuits, the social network has been used to incite violence, spread disinformation, vacuum up personal information, manipulate voters and sow division — problems Facebook has acknowledged, yet has been unable to eliminate. The best response to many of the problems Facebook poses would be to have real, vibrant competition among social networks that gives users better options for privacy, reliability and authenticity. That’s because it has used its enormous resources to expand its offerings as competitors cropped up while also preventing potential rivals from interoperating with its platform — as the states put it in their lawsuit, “constructing a ‘moat’ that competitors could not cross.” Given its current reach and user base, Facebook will remain dominant for some time with or without Instagram and WhatsApp. Innovative rivals need to be able to establish footholds in social networking without being cut off from Facebook’s users, as Twitter was when it introduced the Vine video-clip service in 2013.