>people will start to buy share fractions, with all the shit and overhead that'll bring.

Which is to say, very little overhead

Companies do share splits all the time.

Dividends also give money to people who have shares.

There is not difference beteeen these two mechanisms in who gets the money.

Dividends are better because you don't have to sell to realize the gains. I'd love to own Google and Facebook and get dividends regularly.

How is that better? With buybacks if I want to reinvest I don't have to pay taxes on them and if I want to realize the gains I can decide when to do that myself (of course seem more like an issue in Europe and with companies which only payout yearly).

Because it encourages longer-term ownership, and gives shareholders a stake in the future cash flows of the business.

Like I said, it's the tax treatment that basically stopped growth companies giving dividends. I think that we should change said tax treatment and also make buybacks illegal but that's a bit more controversial.

In any case, for both G and FB, they'd need to do buybacks anyway because of their employee share programs.

Buybacks have the same effect of encouraging long-term ownership.

Given a certain amount of money, spending it on stock buybacks vs spending it on dividends returns the same amount of money to each HOLDING shareholder.

In one case, they receive a small sum. In the other case, the value of their stock goes up.