In the case of China specifically, I would be surprised if Facebook were even actively pursuing the market here. The Chinese have already created a very competent and well-received Facebook clone, ???, and, as alluded to above, Facebook would be a ticking political time bomb. In addition, Facebook draws its immense value from its ability to harvest massive amounts of pertinent information regarding the proclivities and inclinations of target demographics of consumers. That particular business model has already been successfully co-opted here.

Facebook is an internet company, and like most internet companies, it is totally virtual. Because of this, Facebook is far from being a labor-intensive company. Look it up: Facebook, despite spanning the globe and despite making its founder into a billionaire in less than five years, needs only a few thousand people to keep it fully up and running.

Our banking system is another case in point. It is fast becoming nothing more than a virtual component on the World Wide Web. Because of this, our banks, especially the giant TBTF ones, are cutting back on the number of their employees. They are doing this despite that fact they growing both in terms of their net worth and their global reach.

My purpose in saying all this isn't to bash Mark Zuckerberg and his Facebook empire. Nor is it to bash the Goldmans of the World. I'm merely making the point, despite being rather poor at it, that America don't need more entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg and Lloyd Blankfein who are capable of making billions for their companies by having just a skeleton crew of people working for them. We need more entrepreneurs who can create companies that employ large numbers of people. On top of that, we need more entrepreneurs that are more loyal to the American economy than they are to the global economy, thus refusing to outsource American jobs to low-wage countries. This is the only way that we can get our economy back on a growth curve and get our unemployment rate back down below, say, five percent. And the companies that are most likely to accomplish this are the ones that are rooted in real economy, not the ones that are rooted the the virtual economy.

Since there isn't one dominant player in the blogospheric space, it doesn't make much sense to me why Facebook rose to become the only dominant player in the social-networking space. This would be akin to having most of the blog traffic first pass through an almighty blog site, be it this blog or whatever blog, before this traffic moves on to most other blog sites in the blogospheric space. Think of the blogospheric space and the social-networking space as both being separate and distinct toll roads on the internet. Since there is no one single dominant tollbooth called, say, "Foreign Policy" on the blogospheric toll road, then there is no reason whatsoever for there to be a single dominant tollbooth called "Facebook" on the social-networking toll road.

Now I can see why Google rose to become the dominant player in the search-engine space. After all, Google's capacity to handle information is second only to that of the Pentagon's. And since information is second only to money in terms of it's ability to capture and wield power, it's gonna be very difficult for other search engines to break Google's power. But popularity is about only thing that's making Facebook a dominant player in the social-networking space. So Facebook will come and go just like most things do in popular culture. And so it's only a matter of time before another social-networking site moves in, giving Zuckerberg and his Facebook Empire a run for their money.

I'm afraid FB doesn't even begin to understand the world. To start with, it doesn't seem to acknowledge that people's names around the world don't follow the simple North American formula or first name - middle name - last name.
There are people with single word names in vast swathes of the world. In parts of East Asia, people have single-alphabet names and surnames such as A, E or O.
FB won't have it.
If you're so rigid, you'll soon find the world overtaking...

I'm confident that the government can find out anything it wants to about American citizens with or without the use of Facebook.

Unfortunately, the internet provides false information as easily as it provides true, and false information can be a great enemy of government and democracy.