And even more importantly, all the same people still working on the same projects, with the same internal knowledge of the others, friend circles, and back-channel communications. So now you have institutionalized insider trading and back-channel cooperation making their products work better than any competitors' could. (See: MS Windows and MS Office.) The only antitrust model that would work to break up a company like FB, would be to sell the IDEA to a third party (the IP, and possibly the codebase), and to close down the existing product. So suddenly there is no Facebook, no Instagram, no Messenger. Those apps just stop working for 7-8 months until a new company can be formed, a new dev team can be hired (with NONE of the previous company's employees), trained on the code base, and then patching all the "holes" where their code (say, Instagram) integrated with FB and Messenger, so the app is "whole" and can work as a stand-alone app... And now all the "users" need to redownload the app from the new company - call it "Latergram" - and set up new accounts, and all their previous data is lost, and... Yeah. Breaking up a tech company will never work. You can only kinda gently force them to open up to competition, a la Microsoft v Java, which STILL wound up in MS completely fucking Java, and then releasing an identical product that was Windows-only (C#), with hard-wired access into secret OS calls that made it completely fail on any non MS-owned OS or Browser. Everybody ... ummm ... wins? "b) now we have a bunch of medium-sized players, each with their own set of the exact same rules because they're all competing with eachother. It's like having five big banks instead of one. You're going to get the exact same service and restrictions, with very slight variations..."
This isn't hard at all. You say "your business is illegal. You are no longer allowed to make money on it." Suddenly Facebook can no longer collect ad revenue on FB or Instagram. The court gives Zuck 30 days to wind things down and let people download their data. How many days do you think it will take before someone comes up with a business that allows you to upload your data? How many different balkanized Bookfaces are there going to be? And how much advantage does the one that talks to everyone else's balkanized Bookface over the one that keeps your shit behind their paywall? How much advantage does the one that charges you $4 a year and serves no ads over the one that pays you $4 a year and shoves all the ads it wants at you? See, I don't know the answer there. But I know that suddenly we've introduced two or three different dimensions of vendor competition. Maybe I pay $10 a month to keep my shit completely locked down and roam freely over the rest of BookFaceNet with all my data intact. Maybe the kidz all install BookFaceTock because their favorite K-Pop star lives there. I could break up fucking Facebook tomorrow. I could break up Microsoft tomorrow: M$ is no longer allowed to sell software. That means there's a trillion dollar market of businesses who need their M$ shit supported. Remember - theoretically docx is an "open protocol" (lol) so I just need to find the vendor that will disrupt my life the least while not ruining me in the process. They broke up Bell and nothing fucking happened. They broke up the A&P and nothing fucking happened. You kick 'em in the wallet and tell 'em to make money some other way. AT&T in 1981? $99b market cap (2017 dollars). AT&T in 2017? $226b. We wouldn't even have the Internet if Bell hadn't been broken up. What would we have right now if, instead of making a movie celebrating what an amoral dipshit Zuckerberg is, we tore Facebook the fuck down?
I still contend that you are going to put 2500 programmers instantly out of work, they will be hired instantly by others, and they will communicate via back doors and WhatsApp with each other, and collude in the dark to make their "friends" apps more successful and better integrated, and just build more impenetrable - and now diversified - defenses against competition. Do whatever you want to the business... the cogs that make that business work, are still going to try and make their job easier (and the product more successful) in whatever way they can. And that'll involve back-channeling with the rest of the people they used to know at the Tech Giant that has just been broken up. Any new competitor outside of that whisper network is going to have a much steeper hill to climb to get to the same place. It is, in a nutshell, why Facebook is evil: It isn't that someone at the top has an evil plan they have put in motion. It's because of the network effect of a million little bad decisions by thousands of programmers on long leashes, with little oversight or concept of what they are doing in the broader picture of the product, users, and society at large. Now, instead of keeping all those evil little decisions wrapped up in one uber-evil organization, you send them all to the wind to do evil on their own... I just don't see that turning out well for anyone.
You're not making their work illegal, you're making the monetization strategy illegal. They don't need to communicate via WhatsApp, they just need to come up with a business model that abides by the terms of copyright law. The problem isn't the business, the problem is the monetization. Facebook is evil because the way they make money is by selling access to their users. There has been no enforcement as to what their users own and what Facebook owns. Change the strategy from "sell our users' data for whatever we can get" to "sell our users' data for an acceptable profit margin because we now have to pay our users" and everything else takes care of itself. No "million little bad decisions" here - Facebook makes more money for better-targeted advertising and there is ZERO cost for increased targeting. Change that cost from "zero" to "anything" and suddenly there's a whole new business model.