Deny it as we may, it is a fact that most of us have invested a great deal of our lives into the social media website Facebook, which boasts 35 million users in Pakistan. Due to the merger of Whatsapp and Instagram, Facebook now controls and can make use of the personal data and messages of more than 2 billion people in the world.

Is this a scary thought? Some of Facebook’s original co-founders seem to think so.

Chris Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, gave many compelling reasons for why Facebook’s ever-growing power ought to be curtailed. While many, including Mark Zuckerberg himself, have opined that Facebook should be brought under the bureau of regulation, Hughes goes further to demand that regulators should unwind the company’s acquisition of WhatsApp and Instagram, create space for more competition, and enact new privacy legislation that restricts what data Facebook can collect in the United States. Facebook’s absolute monopoly, and its tendency to buy or sink competitors led to Zuckerberg having a totalitarian-esque control over free speech platforms in the world.

There are several problems that can come with Facebook being included under the American government’s free speech standards- it could perhaps lead to Facebook platforming more bigotry and extremism than before. Yet Hughes has a valid argument in light to the dangers of Facebook’s increasing monopoly, and the risks to allowing large mergers in the social media sphere. In the fields of food delivery or music platforms, we see a stream of new and innovative applications, with several new entrepreneurs venturing into these creative grounds. Yet, the competition for social media platforms like Facebook is noticeably at a standstill- competitors have either been bought or sunk. Hughes’s article brings some much-needed light to the issues of anti-trust and monopolies in the arena of untraditional and online businesses- let us see if the global anti-competition commissions will take notice of it.