When Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp collectively experienced outages last Monday and then Friday, the proponents of trustbusting and regulating Mark Zuckerberg’s company were quick to capitalize.

One news headline dubbed Monday as “The day Facebook went dark”—as if the outage was an end‐​of‐​the‐​world doomsday scenario rather than a six‐​hour pause on scrolling. Some pundits argued that the disruption from the outage was “proof” that the company has monopoly power and should be broken up. Others claimed the incident highlighted how Facebook’s services have become “critical infrastructure”—akin to public utilities—and ought to be regulated as such.

Of course, millions of businesses do derive revenues through Facebook advertising, and billions of people use Facebook’s services for cheap communication (especially in the developing world). Facebook itself will primarily bear the costs of the outage, with users and advertisers updating their priors about how much they value the product given that experience.

But if the outage proved anything, it was surely both the weakness of the FTC’s current case against Facebook and the lack of context deployed by those calling the company’s services “critical infrastructure.”

A monopoly that must be broken up?

“If Facebook’s monopolistic behavior was checked back when it should’ve been (perhaps around the time it started acquiring competitors like Instagram), the continents of people who depend on WhatsApp & IG for either communication or commerce would be fine right now. Break them up,” wrote House Representative Alexandria Ocasio‐​Cortez on Twitter last Monday.

We’ve noted before the irony of using Twitter to launch allegations of monopoly power toward Facebook. But remember: the FTC’s case against Facebook hinges on the idea that the company operates in the very siloed “Personal Social Networking (PSN) services in the United States” market. The claim from the FTC is that users access Facebook to “maintain personal relationships and share experiences with friends, family, and other personal connections in a shared social space,” and that these characteristics make it very distinct from other social networks, communications apps, and video apps, from Twitter to TikTok. This very narrow market definition, in fact, is the basis of the FTC’s allegation that Facebook has monopoly power.

The sheer number of users who overcame the outage by simply switching to other apps belies this claim. Snapchat and Twitter, for example, saw global usage surges of 23 percent and 11 percent, respectively, with traffic going so high as to prompt a brief pause of some of Twitter’s messaging services. Telegram and Signal, privacy‐​oriented alternatives to WhatsApp, saw enormous growth too. Telegram gained over 70 million users to its half billion‐​user base in a single day, growing by 16 percent, while Signal grew by 11 percent. Others messaged their work colleagues on Slack, perused TikTok and YouTube, or simply turned to old‐​school SMS texting in place of Facebook’s services.

This substitution within a few hours suggests that Facebook’s main product operates in the broader market for user attention, which in turn facilitates its digital advertising revenue, while Facebook’s WhatsApp competes as a communication service. That billions of people use them ordinarily may in part reflect “network effects” – the truth that users benefit when an app has a larger pool of active users. But if that’s the case, then the “breaking up” of Facebook is clearly bad for consumers, not beneficial. If lots of people use a product because it is convenient to access contacts or connect with friends, a more disparate market is welfare‐​reducing.

The fact that millions and millions of users can so easily open a different communication app or social media service, or actively multi‐​home across platforms, shows that this is a competitive market that is much broader than the FTC implies. That people choose to use Facebook’s products before outages is a reflection of the value they attach to them, not unfair monopolization.

Critical infrastructure that should be regulated as a public utility?

“The Facebook outage on Monday was a planetary‐​scale demonstration of how essential the company’s services have become to daily life…They are critical platforms for doing business, arranging medical care, conducting virtual classes, carrying out political campaigns, responding to emergencies and much, much more,” wrote Raymond Zhong and Adam Satariano in the New York Times..

A small, though vocal, minority has therefore claimed that Facebook’s alleged “critical infrastructure” status necessitates its regulation akin to other vital public utilities such as water, energy and broadband.

Let’s put aside that competition outlined above undermines this “critical infrastructure” claim. It’s not clear why public utilities regulation would ameliorate Facebook’s outages and prevent future service disruptions from happening. Current public utilities that have been heavily regulated for decades, after all, consistently show track records of poor reliability:

• In the American Society of Civil Engineers’ (ASCE) most recent report card on United States infrastructure, 3,526 power outages affected 36.7 million people in 2017 alone.

• The ASCE’s report card on drinking water reported a 27 percent increase in main water breaks between 2012 and 2018, with 250,000 to 300,000 breaks per year. This results in over 6 billion gallons of lost treated drinking water each day.

• The Environmental Protection Agency reports at least 23,000 to 75,000 sanitary sewer overflows each year, in which raw sewage can leak and contaminate groundwater and drinking water.

• Based on pre‐​pandemic data of railway accidents in the US, there were 11,714 accidents, 7,958 injuries, and 878 fatalities in 2019—an annual number that’s remained virtually constant since 2013.

• Internet broadband in the US saw 484 network outage events and 367 ISP outages in the month of August alone.

So what evidence is there that further government intervention into the tech industry would yield any kind of reliability improvement? In the past twelve months, WhatsApp has experienced only nine outages, and Facebook 71. In total, the whole of Facebook Group has seen 196 service interruptions since the beginning of 2021 in the United States, with most being relatively brief, localized, and nearly unnoticeable.

As Sam Bowman has noted, one could presumably argue that outages, accidents, and delays might be even greater in some utilities absent regulation, but that seems a stretch. The evidence instead seems to suggest that private, investor‐​owned utilities are less susceptible to outages and service reductions after severe weather events than municipal utilities, after all. And if history has shown us anything, it’s that using blunt policy tools to regulate Facebook and its subsidiaries like a utility under the guise of “critical infrastructure security” could end up giving the company more market power, all the while limiting the emergence of more viable alternatives that would ultimately benefit consumers.