The Securities and Exchanges Commision (and similar
organizations world wide) already have plenty of
rules governing how companies can raise money and go
public, and disclose information.
For instance, one rule that many people probably don't
know about -- once you have more than 500
shareholders,
you MUST be public on some exchange (or
in other words, your investors must be liquid
in their holdings).
At the same time, we have a lot of concern about tech
monopolies cementing their rule in part by
leveraging the tremendous growth in their revenues (and
corresponding growth in stock price) to
enshrine their domination.
As of now current AntiTrust law is not really designed to
deal with the tech giants, as they're nothing
like Standard Oil.
And how exactly would one "break up" Facebook?
One idea is to force public companies over a certain
capitalization size, and with a sufficient revenue
stream to pay at least minimal dividends. This "free
market" solution has the following advantages:
1. It will tend to drive down pure price speculation.
2. It will tend to reward long term holders, and provide
them a measure of security for long held
leaders that can nevertheless disappear in an instant
(think what happens to Amazon stock the day
Bezos drops dead).
3. It will provide this measure of security without forcing
the investor or speculator's hand, i.e. they
can still reinvest the dividends right back into the stock.
4. It will provide a break on careless growth -- where the
company would not be able to "reinvest"
every penny in growth.
This does put some additional dictates on the company's
allocation of capital -- but really towards
shareholder rights, which seems appropriate.
The dividend would be a fraction of top-line revenue, so
not subject to manipulation by purposefully
losing money.
Put another way and perhaps more simply, once you go
public, you must pay your shareholders
something on an ongoing basis, while they can
individually chose to forego it and reinvest it back into
the company.