This from Benedict Evan’s invaluable newsletter, written in response to Chris Hughes’s long NYT OpEd arguing that Facebook should be broken up…

I think there are two sets of issues to consider here. First, when we look at Google, Facebook, Amazon and perhaps Apple, there’s a tendency to conflate concerns about the absolute size and market power of these companies (all of which are of course debatable) with concerns about specific problems: privacy, radicalization and filter bubbles, spread of harmful content, law enforcement access to encrypted messages and so on, all the way down to very micro things like app store curation. Breaking up Facebook by splitting off Instagram and WhatsApp would reduce its market power, but would have no effect at all on rumors spreading on WhatsApp, school bullying on Instagram or abusive content in the newsfeed. In the same way, splitting Youtube apart from Google wouldn’t solve radicalization. So which problem are you trying to solve?

Second, anti-trust theory, on both the diagnosis side and the remedy side, seems to be flummoxed when faced by products that are free or as cheap as possible, and that do not rely on familiar kinds of restrictive practices (the tying of Standard Oil) for their market power. The US in particular has tended to focus exclusively on price, where the EU has looked much more at competition, but neither has a good account of what exactly is wrong with Amazon (if anything – and of course it is still less than half the size of Walmart in the USA), or indeed with Facebook. Neither is there a robust theory of what, specifically, to do about it. ‘Break them up’ seems to come more from familiarity than analysis: it’s not clear how much real effect splitting off IG and WA would have on the market power of the core newsfeed, and Amazon’s retail business doesn’t have anything to split off (and no, AWS isn’t subsidizing it). We saw the same thing in Elizabeth Warren’s idea that platform owners can’t be on their own platform – which would actually mean that Google would be banned from making Google Maps for Android. So, we’ve got to the point that a lot of people want to do something, but not really, much further.

This is a good summary of why the regulation issue is so perplexing. Our difficulties include the fact that we don’t have an analytical framework yet for (i) analysing the kinds of power wielded by the platforms; (ii) categorising the societal harms which the tech giants might be inflicting; or (iii) understanding how our traditional toolset for dealing with corporate power (competition law, antitrust, etc.) needs to be updated for the contemporary challenges posed by the companies.

Just after I’d read the newsletter, the next item in my inbox contained a link to a Pew survey which revealed the colossal numbers of smartphone users across the world who think they are accessing the Internet when they’re actually just using Facebook or WhatsApp. Interestingly, it’s mostly those who have some experience of hooking up to the Internet via a desktop PC who know that there’s actually a real Internet out there. But if your first experience of Internet connectivity is via a smartphone running the Facebook app (which means that your data may be free), then as far as you are concerned, Facebook is the Internet.

So Facebook has, effectively, blotted out the open Internet for a large segment of humanity. That’s also a new kind of power for which we don’t have — at the moment — a category. Just as the so-called Right to be Forgotten* recognises that Google has the power to render someone invisible. After all, in a networked world, if the dominant search engine doesn’t find you, then effectively you have ceased to exist.

• It’s not a right to be forgotten, merely a right not to be found by Google’s search engine. The complained-of information remains on the website where it was originally published.