Editorial: Facebook is too big. Breaking it up is just part of the solution [Los Angeles Times] The Federal Trade Commission and the attorneys general of 46 states filed lawsuits Wednesday seeking what amounted to a do-over on Facebook — the chance to reject two acquisitions that helped make the social network the behemoth it is today. Those acquisitions — the $1-billion purchase of the mobile picture-sharing network Instagram in 2012 and the $19-billion purchase of the messaging service WhatsApp two years later — absorbed fledgling companies that had threatened to draw users away from Facebook. Yet the FTC initially approved both mergers, and the states did not try to stop them at the time they were announced.