The Federal Government won’t split Facebook into pieces much less shut it down. Facebook is too valuable to national defense. Instead, we expect Facebook to deepen ties with the Federal Government. Someday perhaps FB may become partially nationalized much like Freddie Mac.
Facebook (tkr: FB), is more valuable to the Federal Government as a thriving operation. One that U.S. intelligence agencies may tap into to provide insight into geopolitical risks, sentiment analysis, trend analysis and other advanced analytics-based use cases that may provide an intelligence edge.
The same logic applies to Alphabet (tkr: GOOG). Google’s search platform and related technologies are more valuable to government intelligence agencies if they are thriving technologies used by a growing percentage of the world’s population. Should Facebook and Google experience usage declines, not only will each company’s market cap decrease, the value proposition to Federal intelligence agencies will shrink as well.