I still contend that you are going to put 2500 programmers instantly out of work, they will be hired instantly by others, and they will communicate via back doors and WhatsApp with each other, and collude in the dark to make their "friends" apps more successful and better integrated, and just build more impenetrable - and now diversified - defenses against competition.

Do whatever you want to the business... the cogs that make that business work, are still going to try and make their job easier (and the product more successful) in whatever way they can. And that'll involve back-channeling with the rest of the people they used to know at the Tech Giant that has just been broken up. Any new competitor outside of that whisper network is going to have a much steeper hill to climb to get to the same place.

It is, in a nutshell, why Facebook is evil: It isn't that someone at the top has an evil plan they have put in motion. It's because of the network effect of a million little bad decisions by thousands of programmers on long leashes, with little oversight or concept of what they are doing in the broader picture of the product, users, and society at large.

Now, instead of keeping all those evil little decisions wrapped up in one uber-evil organization, you send them all to the wind to do evil on their own... I just don't see that turning out well for anyone.