Breaking up Amazon would probably make Bezos richer. I'm guessing they could easily split their retail operations with web services.

I know lots of people who have quit Facebook so I don't know why it needs to be split up.

I know this is an old fashioned idea but government should stay out of businesses and let the market decide how big companies get.

The trouble with this is that a company with something approaching monopoly power is not in the best interests of your country. Neither company is there (yet?) with respect to advertising and retail sales.

The irony here is that Amazon is as big as it is due to, in part, government benefits.

Whether or not one man gets richer or poorer has no bearing on the decision to break up a monopoly.

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Civilize the mind, but make savage the body.

- Chinese proverb

Last time I checked, they have competition, some which are doing quite well. So explain to me how it is a monopoly. They make a lot of money, but they are far from being the only game in town.

I’m not saying it is. What I’m saying is that the amount of money one guy makes has no bearing in determining if it is a monopoly. And if it’s determined that it is a monopoly, the fact that Bezos would make more money from breaking it up shouldn’t be a deterrent to do so.

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Civilize the mind, but make savage the body.

- Chinese proverb

There's a lot of confusion out there as to how current anti-trust law is written and where Amazon stands in the grand scheme of things.

U.S. Anti-Trust Law does not outlaw monopolies. It only outlaws monopolistic behavior (e.g. extracting excessive profits and purposefully stifling competition). The "purposefully stifling competition" part of the law is loaded to say the least and that's why most anti-trust cases have focused on consumer harm (extracting excessive profits). Bezos appears to have built Amazon around avoiding an anti-trust lawsuit with the U.S. government because he's been incredibly reticent to make any money from selling goods. Indeed, the e-commerce division of Amazon basically operates at breakeven and always has. In fact, for the majority of its history its operated at a loss. The AWS portion of Amazon basically bankrolls the rest of the company and before that existed as a unit Amazon basically relied on the generosity of its shareholders.

I don't think Amazon will ever run afoul of anti-trust laws as they are currently written. However, I suspect you'll see substantial revisions to anti-trust laws in the next decade. Since the financial crisis, the Federal Reserve and the NBER have been stacked with labor economists. They've churned out research paper after research paper that pretty clearly demonstrate that industry consolidation is bad for workers.

Let me say this: I studied to be an economist and if I'd just followed through with my academic trajectory I'd probably be at one of the Fed banks right now. I didn't but I went far enough down the road to understand the limits to economics as a "social science." A lot of what economists publish is bullshit. Academic and professional economists are both pretty universally bad at predicting economic cycles to the point where it's almost an inside joke and contra-indicators are actually more reliable. I got out of the field when I realized that there was less and less objectivity the higher one climbed in the field and more and more politics and ideology.

With the foregoing said, the research on industry consolidation producing worker harm is pretty damn hard to argue with. It's hard to argue with the data, methodology, or conclusions of any of the papers I've read. It's about as solid as any research the economics profession has every produced. It's non-controversial within the economics profession even across ideologies (Austrians, Fresh Water Schools, Salt Water Schools, Keynsians, Neo-Classicalists, etc.). It's also a pretty easy story to sell the public.

So, with all of that out of the way, I suspect in the next decade you'll see anti-trust laws rewritten to protect both consumers and workers (but only protect workers from a "market power" standpoint... hopefully). This will give the government the legal justification to break up Amazon, Facebook, Google, etc.

Personally I don't know how you'd break up Facebook and I honestly think it's more likely that the platform will implode from a combination of organic domestic attrition and foreign regulatory action. The writing for all of the U.S. tech companies operating in Europe is pretty damn clear and I'm shocked more people can't read it.

With a company like Facebook, the European Union has all of the downside and none of the upside (such as domestic employment). With a companies like Google, Microsoft, etc, Europe is basically a technology/service colony of the United States. In the case of search and email, it wouldn't surprise me if the EU didn't figure out a way to ban Google outright so that they can give those markets to a "home-grown" company. The fines that the EU has assessed on Google thus far over "privacy violations" is a prelude to that. For now it's basically an arbitrary tax. In the future I believe it will be, in some capacity, a ban.

Just pointing out that you seem to be advertising this as being evidence against displaying monopolistic behavior. When I'd argue it that what you're describing could easily fall into the category "predatory pricing" which is an aspect of anti-trust law.
Of course operating at a loss isn't necessarily the same as predatory pricing. But it could certainly be argued that Amazon uses its pricing power to dominate markets when it wants to. It crushed the e-reader market by all but giving away Kindles.

What people miss in this debate is that the government must demonstrate “consumer harm” in an anti-trust case. Predatory pricing for the purpose of accumulating market share is not prohibited and courts rarely consider prospective damage.

Of course consumer harm has to be established in order to break up a company. Duh. That's the whole point.

But let's stay on point. You clearly suggested that operating at a loss is evidence to suggest that monopoly behavior doesn't exist. It is not. To the contrary, in Amazon case it could be circumstantial evidence of market manipulation in some markets. .

Let me clarify. Monopolies and monopolistic behavior are not prohibited under U.S. anti-trust law. The only time either are prohibited is if consumer harm can be demonstrated. If Amazon continues with its current model I think it will be very difficult to ever demonstrate consumer harm.

But I got my stuff too cheap and too quick...

Your post reminds me of a quote in the black swan, that basically says something along the lines of, if you ask 100 economists what is going to happen if we do X, Y, and Z, you'll get 100 different answers.
But then, pretty much everyone agrees on the interpretation after things happened.

Correct, post-hoc rationalization. I remember that passage as well. Economics actually have a unique problem: their models are so ineffective that not only can they not predict the future but they also can’t predict the past! (Econ joke... but true in practice)

Indeed. I actually disagreed with his conclusion that they could explain after things had happened. There are still wide discrepancies in interpretation, based on their school of thought.