In the interests of competition and data protection Facebook should never have been allowed to swallow Instagram and WhatsApp and Microsoft should have been pre

In the interests of competition and data protection Facebook should never have been allowed to swallow Instagram and WhatsApp and Microsoft should have been prevented from acquiring Skype and LinkedIn. Network effects are too strong online to allow mergers of this sort and the potential for abuse too great from both state and non-state actors, not to mention invasion of privacy issues. The bar for mergers and acquisitions ought to be way higher in this domain. If regulation does not fix this I believe these tech companies ought to be divested of these products. Ultimately paid federated services and free & open source software are the only true countermeasures to these very real threats. I would nearly go so far as to say that we should all chip in to make this become reality.