The Federal Trade Commission and a group of 48 Attorney Generals are suing Facebook.

In lawsuits that they filed on Wednesday, they allege that the social network has violated antitrust laws and is a monopoly.

Their remedy?

Break the company up.

Rebecca Hylewile is here to talk about it.

Hey Rebecca.

Hey. So not a brand new idea, right? Obviously there have been a lot of

politicians, most notably Elizabeth Warren, who called for breaking up Facebook.

Mark Zuckerberg has been stressing about this probably since around then.

So like what's the big deal about these lawsuits particular? I mean this isn't just

politicians yapping. Tell me what these lawsuits are trying to do.

These lawsuits are important because they're asking a court to take the action of essentially

forcing Facebook to sell both Instagram and what's up and if you know the court system decides that's

what needs to be done that's what needs to be done we don't need Republican and

Democratic lawmakers to agree on it we don't't need a president. It would go through the courts. So it's

potentially a really, really powerful tool if the court comes up with that conclusion.

I think one of the real problems for Facebook here is that there are all these communications that both lawsuits talk about that seem to break a pretty damaging picture for Facebook in terms of how they saw Instagram and

what's up. You know, so one email that comes up and one of them is Zuckerberg

writing after the Instagram acquisition. I remember your internal post about how

Instagram was our threat and not Google Plus. You were basically right. One thing

about startups though is that you can often acquire them. So you know this is not a great picture for Facebook. So the thing is right is that

the FTC this agency that is co leaving these lawsuits against Facebook they approved these acquisitions or at least didn't block them when both of them happened.

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