Some of these companies look to casual observers like immovable monoliths of corporate power. Microsoft used to look like that, too, and it wasn’t the hysterically imbecilic antitrust action overseen by Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson that kneecapped Bill Gates & Co. — it was the Internet. The day before yesterday, Apple was small enough and struggling so woefully that there were plausible rumors of its becoming a minor division within Sony; today, it is five times the size of Sony by market capitalization, and seems untouchable. Before there was Facebook, there was MySpace, which was the largest social-networking site in the world as recently as 2009. It became a minor division within NewsCorp and then was owned by Justin Timberlake for a while, and today is part of the portfolio of a technology holding company you’ve never heard of that doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page.

Past is prologue.

I wish Facebook the best of luck — unlike a lot of my right-leaning friends who for some reason call themselves nationalists, I prefer to see American businesses and enterprises succeed and dominate worldwide markets, and I think that the country and the American people are as a whole better off when they do. (“Nationalists” love America — except for Silicon Valley, Wall Street, the Ivy League, the almost-Ivy League, 92 percent of professional sports, Hollywood, Amazon, all the states east of West Virginia save one little slice of Maine, and every city larger than Lubbock, Texas.) But I’d also like to see Facebook make a better product — and, being an old-fashioned sort, I still believe that competition is much more likely to effect that sort of innovation than is government regulation. And, if Facebook doesn’t get its act together, it’ll end up like MySpace or PanAm or U.S. Steel, and your Aunt Jeanie will have to yell virtually at people about her ignorant political beliefs in some other forum.