On April 10th, when Zuckerberg arrived at the Senate hearing, he wore a sombre blue suit, and took a seat before more than forty senators. In front of him, his notes outlined likely questions and answers, including the prospect that a senator might ask him to step down from the company. His answer, in shorthand, would be: “Founded Facebook. My decisions. I made mistakes. Big challenge, but we’ve solved problems before, going to solve this one. Already taking action.”
As it turned out, nobody asked him to resign—or much of anything difficult. Despite scattered moments of pressure, the overwhelming impression left by the event was how poorly some senators grasped the issues. In the most revealing moment, Orrin Hatch, the eighty-four-year-old Republican from Utah, demanded to know how Facebook makes money if “users don’t pay for your service.” Zuckerberg replied, “Senator, we run ads,” allowing a small smile.
To observers inclined to distrust Zuckerberg, he was evasive to the point of amnesiac—he said, more than forty times, that he would need to follow up—but when the hearing concluded, after five hours, he had emerged unscathed, and Wall Street, watching closely, rewarded him by boosting the value of Facebook’s stock by twenty billion dollars. A few days later, on the internal Facebook message board, an employee wrote that he planned to buy T-shirts reading “Senator, we run ads.”
When I asked Zuckerberg whether policymakers might try to break up Facebook, he replied, adamantly, that such a move would be a mistake. The field is “extremely competitive,” he told me. “I think sometimes people get into this mode of ‘Well, there’s not, like, an exact replacement for Facebook.’ Well, actually, that makes it more competitive, because what we really are is a system of different things: we compete with Twitter as a broadcast medium; we compete with Snapchat as a broadcast medium; we do messaging, and iMessage is default-installed on every iPhone.” He acknowledged the deeper concern. “There’s this other question, which is just, laws aside, how do we feel about these tech companies being big?” he said. But he argued that efforts to “curtail” the growth of Facebook or other Silicon Valley heavyweights would cede the field to China. “I think that anything that we’re doing to constrain them will, first, have an impact on how successful we can be in other places,” he said. “I wouldn’t worry in the near term about Chinese companies or anyone else winning in the U.S., for the most part. But there are all these places where there are day-to-day more competitive situations—in Southeast Asia, across Europe, Latin America, lots of different places.”
The rough consensus in Washington is that regulators are unlikely to try to break up Facebook. The F.T.C. will almost certainly fine the company for violations, and may consider blocking it from buying big potential competitors, but, as a former F.T.C. commissioner told me, “in the United States you’re allowed to have a monopoly position, as long as you achieve it and maintain it without doing illegal things.”
Facebook is encountering tougher treatment in Europe, where antitrust laws are stronger and the history of fascism makes people especially wary of intrusions on privacy. One of the most formidable critics of Silicon Valley is the European Union’s top antitrust regulator, Margrethe Vestager. Last year, after an investigation of Google’s search engine, Vestager accused the company of giving an “illegal advantage” to its shopping service and fined it $2.7 billion, at that time the largest fine ever imposed by the E.U. in an antitrust case. In July, she added another five-billion-dollar fine for the company’s practice of requiring device makers to preinstall Google apps.