Thumbs Up (Gwen Moritz Editor’s Note)

At a time when political polarization is so intense that the president of the United States can raise hundreds of millions of dollars from the fact that he lost his reelection bid by 7 million votes, only one thing seems to have near-unanimous support regardless of political affiliation: regulating Facebook.

Only Republican attorneys general (and not all of those) support the mind-boggling idea of disenfranchising millions of voters in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin because those states preferred Joe Biden over Donald Trump. But more than 40 AGs, led by New York’s and including our own Leslie Rutledge, came together last week to bring a massive antitrust lawsuit against Facebook Inc., owner and operator of the Facebook and Instagram social media platforms and Whatsapp messaging system.

The Federal Trade Commission simultaneously filed its own antitrust case against Facebook. Both the federal and multistate actions make the same complaint: Facebook has quashed competition by using its vast market dominance to buy up promising startups.

The remedy sought: to break up Facebook.

Now, I know this is hard to believe, but I’m old enough to remember Ma Bell. For the significant number of readers who don’t have a clue what I’m talking about, Ma Bell was AT&T, which until the early 1980s was the ubiquitous provider of both local and long-distance telephone service, which were two different products.

Ultimately, AT&T agreed to spin off the local operating companies that provided home and business phone service — the “Baby Bells” — into standalone companies that were small enough for other local providers to compete with. For a long time, the word divestiture meant only one thing to me: the breakup of AT&T.

I also remember the first time I saw a TV commercial for Sprint. I had only recently started paying my own bills, and an offer to lower the cost of long-distance calls — like calling my parents in North Little Rock from my apartment in Pine Bluff — was intriguing. But the idea that a company other than AT&T could sell me that service was mind-blowing — until suddenly long-distance providers were springing up everywhere.

Breaking up AT&T did foster competition. Allied Telephone Co., one of Arkansas’ small wireline providers, merged with Mid-Continent Telephone Corp. of Ohio in 1983 to create Alltel Corp. And while the Alltel name will gradually fade from memory like Ma Bell, it was a huge corporate player in Arkansas and nationally for the next two decades, getting in on the ground floor of the cellphone revolution that made long-distance calls a foreign concept to anyone under 40.

Facebook didn’t invent social media, but it did perfect the business plan just when the internet was about to become portable. Like most people, especially most journalists, I have a love-hate relationship with Facebook: I love how easy it has made keeping in touch with people I have known through the various phases of my life, but I hate what it has done to the news industry, vacuuming off advertising revenue even as much of its content comes from newspapers — linked by users like me. At the current rate of change, Facebook’s annual revenue will soon overtake that of all the newspapers left in the world.

Of course, newspapers can and do lock down their content, depriving Facebook and its users of some of that proprietary content. But that only elevates the role of “free” sources. And I hope I don’t need to remind Arkansas Business readers that social media memes are not, in fact, reliable sources of news, information or data. (Folks, you can’t even trust anonymous meme-makers to attribute quotes correctly.)

Non-journalists have other complaints about Facebook. For instance, there’s a widespread belief that Facebook discriminates against conservative political opinions despite the fact that links to right-leaning voices like Fox News and Ben Shapiro are routinely among the most-shared posts.

That complaint and mine are not going to be addressed by the litigation filed last week, but I didn’t notice any uprising in defense of Facebook. Even the business community that generally takes a dim view of regulation understands that regulation helps create a level playing field and that monopolies are anti-business as much as anti-consumer.

Social media will continue to grow and evolve if Facebook is put on a leash. Would any of us prefer to go back to the days of Ma Bell?

I still don’t Instagram.

Gwen Moritz is the editor of Arkansas Business.