Occam's razor is a principle that says when something happens that can be explained in multiple ways, the simplest explanation is usually the right one. The same is true of solutions: The simplest, most straightforward solution is usually the best way to solve a problem.
In the United States, social media giant Facebook Inc. has become a problem. It makes its money — $23.3 billion in 2017 adjusted earnings — by running roughshod over privacy concerns, selling users' data to advertisers. Along with Amazon, Apple and Google, it has "aggregated more economic value and influence than nearly any other commercial entity in history," as the marketing professor Scott Galloway wrote in Esquire earlier this year.
It's a monopoly, having either bought or crushed most potential competitors. It stifles innovation; as my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Noah Smith noted recently, potential startups can't get capital if venture capitalists think they might wind up as Facebook road kill. (Such companies are said to be in Facebook's "kill zone.")
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