Fox news was talking about some judge will now allow the suit to break up Facebook to go forward. Fine by me. Then Fox had a bunch of talking heads talk about the possible Facebook breakup. None of the talking heads understood what a breakup is about. You take a monopoly, Facebook is surely that, and break it up into two or more pieces that are supposed to compete with each other.
In that way one piece of Facebook, lets call it Goodbook, does things that attract users and advertisers. The other piece, call it Badbook, does things that repel users and advertisers. Pretty soon the suits at Badbook notice that they are losing ground to the competition, and order changes to make Badbook more competitive.
The talking heads were talking about regulation. In this case, all the important decisions of Facebook are done by a small cadre of programmers, writing in C or C++ or some networking computer language are the only documentation that means anything.
Regulators cannot read computer code (most of 'em cannot read comic books) and so, not knowing what is really going on, cannot effect it. In short, a regulator of Facebook can draw his pay but cannot change the way Facebook does things.
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