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Trust busting can seem like it’s anti free market, but when a company has a monopoly on a network it stops functioning as a company and basically becomes a government. The problem with Facebook/Amazon/Google is that they have a monopoly on a specific information network, for Facebook the social graph, internet discoverability for Google, and online shopping for Amazon. It’s similar to if a single company owned the road systems or the internet, since the structure of these networks means that competitors can’t exist, there can only be one network for it to have value, so the first company to build it will have a monopoly and be able to indefinitely milk it for a profit.

The same thing happened with railroad barons in the 1800s and also in other areas of the economy, and the trust busting response the government took seems to have worked well to bring back a fair market. Government should keep the information networks predictable and accessible.

This is a core theme in George Gilder’s controversial but imho extremely insightful book Knowledge and Power: The Information Theory of Capitalism and How it is Revolutionizing our World: https://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Power-Information-Capitalis...

⬐ adfrhgeaq5hy

Well, duh. "Free market" does not mean "unregulated market". It requires that the market be free from monopolies and that all agents have complete information. Regulation and trust-busting are, in practice, required to bring about a free market.

Co-opting the term "free market" was a fantastically successful bit of propaganda.

⬐ hk1337

It could be that idea of a free market if everyone did what was right and not cheat, screw over, sabotage the competition to get ahead. You beat the competition by being better.

We don't have that though, people are assholes, so we have a regulated market.

⬐ adfrhgeaq5hy

The problem is the system. Let us assume we have 99.9% moral people who never lie and never break the law even if they can gef away with it. Problem is the 0.1% have a competitive advantage. They will accumulate more wealth and power than the others. The others can either compromise on their morality or lose ground against their competition, maybe failing entirely. The amoral people will gain outsized power and will force others to sacrifice their values. The whole system can be corrupted by a tiny minority.

I certainly do blame some individuals who are particularly vile, like Zuckerberg and Musk, but for the most part this is just what happens in competition.

⬐ hk1337

> The problem is the system.

The problem is the people. Everything else after that I agree with. For a completely free market to work 100% of the people would have to be moral, upstanding people.

A completely free, unregulated, market is an anarchocapitalist's utopia. Like how a working socialist government is a utopia.

Neither of those is realistic though, so we have a regulated free market.

⬐ jessaustin

Regulators are also people.

⬐ publicpretender

I agree. The idea should be "perfectly competitive" -- which could be very regulated.

Noah Smith had a good article on this with links to economics papers and brief summaries:

https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/the-economists-revolt

⬐ gshubert17

"Uncoerced market" or something, is closer to the meaning I seek.

⬐ munificent

"Free market" is a fine term. People just forget about the "market" part.

A "market" isn't some natural emergent property of the physical or social world. They aren't formed by, like, volcanoes. A market, historically, is a space defined deliberately by a governing body where traders are allowed to participate and where trade is allowed to occur under a given set of rules.

It's suposed to be a free market, not a free anything-goes-chaos-and-anarchy.

⬐ maxwell

Exactly, Adam Smith was no laissez-faire ideologue.

https://gutenberg.edu/2013/03/adam-smith-was-no-laissez-fair...

⬐ ethbr0

An associated component to trust-busting should be foreign trust blocking.

Given the way the world works, if the US breaks Facebook up, (insert here) government-supported competitor takes its place.

Part of creating a fair, diverse playing field is ensuring international competition is playing by the same rules in the internal market (because you have no jurisdiction to prosecute them as a monopoly in their home country).

Which isn't an argument for not breaking Facebook up. But is an argument that if you break Facebook up, you should probably impose substantial limitations on ByteDance and Tencent as they operate in the US.

⬐ hellbannedguy

"Given the way the world works, if the US breaks Facebook up, (insert here) government-supported competitor takes its place."

I don't think that will happen. Americans selfworth, on a deep psychological level, is tied to making large amounts of money. (And yes, I find it sad)

We will have many new Zuck types coding away in the new gold rush if FB is crippled. I sometimes think the only reason FB is as financially successful is because Zuck knew no one would love him without money.

America is loaded with white fugly irritating intelligent investors that would love to make more money.

Tech will stay here.

⬐ Robotbeat

What I want addressed is how we can bust these companies without making the experience worse for consumers or making things less efficient.

A railroad that'd require a toll every mile because you split one company into hundreds wouldn't be viable. If I had to visit multiple web pages to get the same result as a google search, that'd also be bad.

Amazon online shopping has a "monopoly" almost purely because the monopoliness makes it much easier and lower friction than trying to find an online store that is 1) somewhat trustworthy 2) consistent UI 3) ships in a reasonable time 4) isn't going to disappear (and importantly, already has my shipping and payment information). I regularly buy stuff online from elsewhere, but I use Amazon more often because it reduces the cognitive load by centralizing/standardizing everything.

⬐ hippich

I have come to a conclusion lately that there is no free lunch. You either optimize and increase risks (of system becoming monopoly like rail roads in the past, or busting like mortgage companies in 2007-8, government becoming tyranny, something like that) or you pay for inefficiencies. I think the free market is really about finding a balance between optimizations and risks. If the company is too optimized and carries significant risk - eventually, it will bust. If the marker is not efficient because of transactions volume - a larger company will inevitably emerge (and if it continues to grow - eventually bust)

EDIT: what really worries people about monopolies is that it takes more than a generation to see these companies bust. And to, again, optimize it, we come up with antitrust laws... But any optimization, in my opinion, costs risks and never is free (as in lunch).

⬐ huitzitziltzin

>> Amazon online shopping has a "monopoly" almost purely because the monopoliness makes it much easier and lower friction than trying to find an online store that is 1) somewhat trustworthy 2) consistent UI 3) ships in a reasonable time 4) isn't going to disappear (and importantly, already has my shipping and payment information). I regularly buy stuff online from elsewhere, but I use Amazon more often because it reduces the cognitive load by centralizing/standardizing everything.

This is a firm being successful, not a monopolist. This is exactly what antitrust law shouldn't (and does not) punish!

~antitrust economist

⬐ arrosenberg

I'd press your claim of efficiency. As we are learning now, efficiency (in the JIT sense of the word) and robustness are a single sliding scale. Our global supply chain was a wonder of human achievement until it hit a snag, and now it's a complete mess.

Using Amazon as an example - the larger they've grown, they've actually become less trustworthy and a worse experience for consumers. Amazon has been stricken with all the negative traits that American culture associates with "big" government - bad user experience, bloat, fraud, and arbitrary bureaucracy. I've naturally found myself wanting to use them less and less, the larger they've gotten.

⬐ Robotbeat

What’s interesting about Amazon is they don’t seem to have been any worse affected from supply chain issues than anyone else. At least not that I have noticed anecdotally.

⬐ lrem

The general idea would be breaking things into viable businesses and imposing compatibility with competitors. So, for Amazon, spin off the delivery and allow others to do the driving around, provided they can meet the same requirements around picking up from the warehouse and so on. For Google, spin off the DC operations. And so on.

It becomes harder conceptually if you try to break things in the software layer. Working in Google, I just cannot fathom what would it take to actually allow competing ads platforms in search.

⬐ toast0

The railroad example would be solved by forming a single-purpose clearing house business to distribute the tolls, collected by the origin or destination carrier, among all the rail providers on the route. It's the same process in banking --- you can deposit a check drawn on any bank, and a clearing house process routes the funds. It's the same in public stock trading, you can use any brokerage, but almost all shares are owned by Cede & Co on the corporate books.

You can split out payment and address retention easily: paypal and amazon both offer 3rd party checkout systems. If we're trustbusting Amazon, force that to be an independent company, offered on FRAND terms to all.

I think you could probably seperate into three business the fulfilment included marketplace consignment store from the merchant fulfilled marketplace consignment store from the sold by amazon store. Although, since two of those share facilities, it might be a little tough. Perhaps, splitting off the store from the inventory makes more sense --- if Amazon is just one of the marketplace vendors and the marketplace is a separate entity, that eliminates some of the unfair practices (require marketplace vendors to share sources, contract sources directly to undercut marketplace vendors).

You could also split off warehouses off into individual or regional baby-bell style corporations; vendors could send to whichever warehouses they like, the marketplace could choose which warehouse to use to fulfill orders, each warehouse could be reasonably independent.

Shipping/delivery could clearly be made independent. AWS, too.

I think the point of trustbusting is not necessarily to eliminate monopoly or dominant businesses, it's to reduce the scope of the monopoly such that dominance in one area doesn't become dominance in more areas. If there's a single purpose marketplace corporation, it may be dominant, but if it's prevented from controlling warehousing, shipping, and inventory, there's more room in those areas. After the breakup, you can still come back and do more to address the smaller areas, if they prove to be problematic under the new system.

⬐ sli

> and online shopping for Amazon

Not just shopping, but also AWS. It is functionally impossible to use the internet and not patron Amazon because of the ubiquity of AWS. It's not a monopoly because there are technically competitors, but the sheer scope of AWS reach makes consumer choice a practical impossibility.

I do nearly all of my internet shopping away from Amazon, only resorting to it when there's no other choice. But nearly every website I visit is powered by AWS at some level, either directly (the site itself) or indirectly (one of the site's service providers). To my mind, this is something new(ish) that is monopoly-adjacent and needs to be taken a bit more seriously. Telling people not to use the internet, or to deeply audit every service they patron, is not a practical solution at all, even for technical users, nevermind the average non-technical user.

⬐ huitzitziltzin

> But nearly every website I visit is powered by AWS at some level, either directly (the site itself) or indirectly (one of the site's service providers). To my mind, this is something new(ish) that is monopoly-adjacent and needs to be taken a bit more seriously. Telling people not to use the internet, or to deeply audit every service they patron, is not a practical solution at all, even for technical users, nevermind the average non-technical user.

It isn't the job of antitrust law to make sure you don't have to use AWS.

Also: AWS is not plausibly a monopoly at all. It faces competition from a number of other cloud providers AND doesn't have a particularly large market share in cloud services anyway.

~ antitrust economist

⬐ ragnarok451

I was surprised by this too, but AWS only has 32% of cloud market share https://www.parkmycloud.com/blog/aws-vs-azure-vs-google-clou....

⬐ spaced-out

Back in 2018 it was nearly half, people don't realize how much market share they've lost in the last few years

⬐ niuzeta

Wow, what happened? Loss of 10+ percentage of market share is pretty huge. Or did the market simply expand that quickly?

⬐ mmcdermott

I've definitely run into companies in Amazon-adjacent fields of endeavor employing a "no AWS" rule.

⬐ jimmaswell

A social network is a natural monopoly due to the network effect. It wouldn't make any sense to split it up. Regulating it like any other natural monopoly could make sense.

Amazon is certainly not an online shopping monopoly. It's just a superior service. I can get a similar online shopping experience from Wal Mart and many others. If Amazon can offer us such good service through having its own big network of warehouses, drivers, etc. that's impossible with a bunch of smaller companies then I say let them be as big as they are so long as they don't egregiously abuse it.

⬐ nathias

>A social network is a natural monopoly due to the network effect.

Thats exactly why it should be split up and regulated more heavily.

⬐ annadane

> A social network is a natural monopoly due to the network effect. It wouldn't make any sense to split it up. Regulating it like any other natural monopoly could make sense.

They definitely need to take Whatsapp away from Facebook, though. Regulators only allowed it under specific conditions and Facebook violated those conditions

⬐ mhink

> A social network is a natural monopoly due to the network effect. It wouldn't make any sense to split it up.

This isn’t entirely accurate. Federated social networking is entirely feasible, and arguably the only reason it isn’t more widespread is because large non-federated social networks have an active interest in not federating.

Breaking up Facebook would make it possible for social-network “hub operators” to compete on the basis of moderation quality, administrative practices, and site quality.

⬐ deltree7

Facebook, Amazon, Google were not the first, they were the best.

But hey, since we are in pitch-fork mode, we can simply make up stuff to our fellow-brainwashed posters. How is this different from Q?

⬐ AnthonyMouse

> The problem with Facebook/Amazon/Google is that they have a monopoly on a specific information network, for Facebook the social graph, internet discoverability for Google, and online shopping for Amazon.

None of these things are a natural monopoly.

Facebook only stays relevant by buying its competitors. You don't even need to break them up, just disable acquisitions. Then Instagram would be separate, WhatsApp would be separate. You don't even have to break them apart, just wait for the next one and don't let them buy it.

Google is the biggest search engine but search isn't a natural monopoly. Their dominant position comes from all the vertical integration. Google owns YouTube and YouTube is featured prominently in Google Search results. To get Android/Google Play, OEMs have to use Google as their default search engine. To fix this you don't have to regulate the search results, just separate the search engine from the other companies, and stop allowing them to buy competing ad networks.

Amazon doesn't really even have a dominant market position. They're not a railroad, they're Internet Walmart. They're just the biggest player in a highly competitive market. They have no capacity to significantly raise prices or people would immediately switch to any of their hundreds of competitors. Most of the complaints are from competitors butthurt that Amazon is keeping everyone's margins slim -- but that's what they're supposed to be doing.

A railroad is a natural monopoly. You can't really break up a natural monopoly, so you have to regulate it, which is terrible.

None of this tech stuff is like that. The problems here come from consolidation through mergers and vertical integration. They're unnatural monopolies with clear lines across which they can be broken up without long-term regulation. Just stop letting them buy their competitors.

⬐ Apes

Amazon does leverage their position as market maker to undercut competition with anti-competitive practices though. They run data analytics to figure out what goods are the most profitable, then launch competing products and promote their own over the originals in their listings. Their monopoly gives them the ability to take over nearly any market they want at any time, with no consequences.

⬐ AnthonyMouse

> They run data analytics to figure out what goods are the most profitable, then launch competing products and promote their own over the originals in their listings.

Figuring out which products have high margins and entering those markets is an increase in competition.

Promoting their own listings is only a problem if the competitors can't reach those customers in any other reasonable way, which isn't the case because there are many other online retailers and it's quite feasible for a medium sized competitor to sell directly to the customer on their own website.

⬐ wilburTheDog

>Just stop letting them buy their competitors.

And how would you stop them from simply replacing their competitors? From the article "Budding companies that resist being acquired are pruned through flagrant copying." Would you pass a law that said Facebook can't expand their business to do anything a competitor is doing? I can't see how that would fly.

⬐ jensensbutton

> And how would you stop them from simply replacing their competitors?

Competent competitors will do that naturally. See TikTok vs Reels.

⬐ AnthonyMouse

Copying doesn't really work. WhatsApp was big before Facebook bought them. Just because you copy some feature they had doesn't mean anybody is going to move back. Having the feature first makes you better. Having the feature second only makes you the same.

And the challenger has an advantage against a conglomerated incumbent because they can add features that reduce profits in ancillary markets the challenger isn't in. The incumbent won't want to copy that and cannibalize their other market, but the users want that feature so the challenger gains market share.

⬐ throwaway09223

Google isn't primarily a search engine. By revenue they're primarily an ad network.

Ad networks naturally form monopolies. Ad matching algorithms can make better matches (more revenue per click and more desirable product for advertisers) the more ad campaigns they have to select from and the more display properties they have to publish ads to. It's a market extremely prone to winner-takes-all.

I say this as someone who worked internally on an ad system which used to be one of Google's primary competitors. I specifically worked on projects intended to address these runaway network effects. It wasn't possible and the company exited the business (they actually tried to be a customer of google's because it'd be more profitable to just show their ads, but this was blocked on antitrust grounds ...)

The monopolistic aspects of these entities aren't necessarily the customer facing products they market to the masses.

⬐ AnthonyMouse

Ad networks don't naturally form monopolies. That's why Google had to buy the other ones. Anything will form a monopoly if you let every company in the industry merge.

Just because something has a network effect doesn't make it a natural monopoly. The network effect means the network may need a minimum size in order to be viable, but that doesn't mean there can't be a dozen competing networks of that size that are all viable.

⬐ throwaway09223

It does, because the increased efficiency means ads are more profitable on the larger platforms. Bigger matching pools mean better conversion rates.

Why would you spend more money to buy a less-well performing ad?

Why would you display a less well paying ad on your web property?

If you're doing search ads, you cannot fund the megawatts of infrastructure to keep pace with google if you're working with smaller margins. This is not theoretical - adwords/search has destroyed almost all of the competition, save those who have other ways of funding themselves.

⬐ AnthonyMouse

> Bigger matching pools mean better conversion rates.

So the smaller networks would make less money than Google. Less money than Google isn't the same as less money than is necessary to run servers.

And servers get cheaper as time goes on. The number of "megawatts" you need to serve a given number of ads is exponentially decreasing over time.

> This is not theoretical - adwords/search has destroyed almost all of the competition, save those who have other ways of funding themselves.

You can't ignore the companies they bought out when you say the others went out of business. They don't have any reason to buy a competitor that was just going to fail anyway, and they empirically have bought several competitors.

⬐ throwaway09223

No, this isn't true. The hardware necessary to run a competitive search engine increases over time on a massive scale because the size of the internet grows faster than the price of hardware can fall.

This is why search engines have consolidated into Google and Bing. It is not currently possible to create a search engine.

> The number of "megawatts" you need to serve a given number of ads is exponentially decreasing over time.

This is completely backwards. This is not theoretical, this is a fact. Please understand that I spent half a decade building bigger and bigger datacenters because the rate of infrastructure expansion to keep pace with growth is absolutely massive.

> You can't ignore the companies they bought out when you say the others went out of business.

They did not buy out their primary competitor. I have an insider view here and while I can't share the details I can say that you really have no idea what you're talking about.

⬐ jeremydeanlakey

"when a company has a monopoly on a network it... basically becomes a government."

A monopoly functions like a government.

Or inverted: a government functions like a monopoly.

I find both angles interesting.

⬐ mrkstu

Generally a government is the entity with a monopoly on force. That is why things like drug cartels or the mafia are so poisonous to the body politic.

⬐ chiefalchemist

That's the crux of the friction here. The old monopoly (gov) is being overrun by the new "monopoly" (tech). While it might not be a battle for the known universe, controlling the spice (i.e., attention, information, nudges, etc.) is definitely in play.

⬐ dantheman

A government is a monopoly on violence, and it uses that monopoly to demand payment.

⬐ ItsMonkk

I'm found of "a democratically elected government is the least bad monopoly". If you must have a monopoly, it should be a government. But if you can avoid a monopoly, do that instead.

⬐ AnthonyMouse

An important corollary to this is that monopolies should be isolated rather than integrated.

Suppose we say the municipal water system is a natural monopoly, so we're going to have the government do it.

Well, then the head of the municipal water system should be an elected position, so that if they're screwing it up, people can vote the bums out without having to remove a mayor or governor who might otherwise be doing a good job on some other issues and therefore be hard to remove.

That's the biggest problem with federal elections. Each party does a different set of terrible things and you can't vote against one set of failures without voting for the other one when everything is integrated.

⬐ BitwiseFool

The problem I have with "The Free Market" is that it is a platonic ideal. Going a step further, the whole concept of a Free Market was developed before the advent of the Network Effect and the kind of economy we have today. As such, I think defenders of the Free Market do not have adequate tools to address the kind of "monopoly" that Facebook/Apple/Google enjoy today because of their business models. Free Market competition works great on a small to medium scale. The idea that you have some competitive advantage and can capitalize on that works wonderfully, but not for things like social media and companies with a market cap of over a trillion dollars.

⬐ throw63738

18th century England had strict anti monopoly laws. For example canal owners could not operate their own boats. This type of centralization and monopoly acceptance came with railroads.

⬐ rndmind

To piggy back on your comment...

Free markets only exist because of regulation.

It's regulation that allows actors to participate in good faith, and not get smoked by the huge whales and owners of exchanges, etc.

⬐ snarf21

We really need a funded and functioning SEC and FTC. They have failed us in the 21st century. However, breaking things up won't be a panacea. It worked in the past but even spinning out Instagram won't open up much space for an Instagram competitor given the existing network effects. To fix some of these issues, I think we need a tax on digital advertising revenue. Right now it is way too profitable to just create click-bait and rake in the money.

⬐ Nasrudith

The idea of taxing digital advertising revenue because it is too profitable as an antidote makes no sense on at least three different levels.

1. It being profitable is good for getting more people to get into the market. Taxing it by activity if anything discourages competition! 2. What does degree of profitability have to do with clickbait? Spamming isn't very profitable but it does generate some revenue so we are stuck with the crap. 3. The advertiser network's profit is entirely seperate from how much the individual end-point earns by showing them.

⬐ taurath

Building another Facebook isn’t hard, but the network effect makes it almost impossible. Then they have their acquisition team to ensure that anything that does make it through doesn’t last long. The idea that they’re out there competing on their own merits is silly.

I think that’s one of the big differences - they have a monopoly on the means of production (the userbase), which is less ephemeral than say owning all the steel plants and mines.

⬐ bumby

One of the issues that I have with your analogy is that the monopolies you mentioned (roads, internet, rail) all have substantial physical assets that are tied to their monopoly power. For example, even without factoring in the cost of land, it can cost up to $700k per mile of rail track. These kinds of upfront costs are one of the major moats they have to keeping outside competitors from emerging. I'm not sure the digital-era monopolies discussed have this same type of barrier to entry.

The internet example is a more interesting analogy to me because it seems to align more with a utility, which we're okay with having monopolies existing, albeit regulated, because of the greater efficiencies.

So are social networks, online shopping, or search public goods? If so, should they be regulated because we think there is an advantage to having a monopoly in this space? If not, what are their barriers of entry that stifle competition?

I don't necessarily don't think they shouldn't be broken up, but I'm trying to understand whether/how they fit into previous paradigms or if the monopoly paradigm is fundamentally different in this digital era.

⬐ dontblink

I'd put in Microsoft in there. Their Windows (desktop OS) dominance needs to be reigned in and potentially spun off.

⬐ 1vuio0pswjnm7

The only way these companies can generate sufficient revenues is through advertising. It really does not matter what moonshot projects they are working on. There is not enough willingness to pay for that "work" to sustain a business.

The internet has value besides being a vector for advertising. This is more or less what the parent comment is suggesting.

Who pays the cost of supporting the internet. Internet subscribers. We finance (a) the delivery of advertising, (b) creation metadata about our usage (e.g., empty POST requests, beacons, various forms of telemtry, etc.) and (c) uploading our data to their computers.

⬐ asiachick

That road analogy fails pretty quickly. If we wanted to follow that direction then it would like owning a home where there are 20 roads directly in front of your house and you can choose any one of them but you keep choosing Apple/Amazon/Facebook/Google

For example I just moved and had to buy lots of stuff. I ordered from Macy's, Walmart, Target, Wayfair, and Amazon.

It's trivial to use Bing or Ducduckgo over Google. When a search engine starts doing better for me I'll switch.

As for Facebook, plenty of people using other services to stay connected

⬐ armchairhacker

Another problem is that Facebook, Amazon, and Google get special treatment. There are explicit filters in WebKit (and probably mozilla) which allow special features for certain big-name companies. Also the App Store gives exemptions (e.g. VoIP notifications) to certain social apps. And most websites block crawlers but allow Google and Internet Archive.

This IMO is a better argument towards anti-competitiveness. I absolutely get that there needs to be filters for certain privileges, but hard-coding them for big-name apps is not the answer.

⬐ dont__panic

Devil's advocate question: I don't really remember my railroad history in the US, but I do know that railroads are so mediocre as to be barely usable these days.

Does that have anything to do with weakening the railroad industry at a critical moment just before the automobile industry popped up and ate their lunch?

Could we be risking a similar problem here with the successors to Facebook's social media, Google's internet search algos, and Amazon's shopping experience?

⬐ ZeroGravitas

This book sounded interesting to me, but it appears the author is controversial because he doesn't believe in evolution amongst other things which dampens my enthusiasm:

https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/George_Gilder

⬐ SkeuomorphicBee

> when a company has a monopoly on a network it stops functioning as a company and basically becomes a government.

That is very aptly put. To go on a bit of a tangent, I would go even further and say that companies are always a form of government, even without a monopoly, but the addition of a monopoly just extends the power and reach of such individual government.

In the modern capitalist systems, the collective of all companies together are the branch of govern that decide what will be produced and where-and-how people are going to work, all that under the checks and balances of the free-market and the official branches government. That is, an individual company is a form of tiny local government (not local in geography, but in scope) with the mandate to govern some aspects of the life of their employees (what they will be doing for 40h a weak), and the production of their particular products, being that mandate can be removed and transferred to other company by the free market.

Now, I know that this metaphor I described is not a 100% perfect fit, if stretched to the extremes it will arrive at absurd corners where companies are nothing like governments. But then, no metaphor is perfect, not even the metaphor officially supported by the USA Judiciary branch, that "companies are people". They are only useful, and only fit in small contexts, and as such I believe "companies are government" is a very useful one and should be part of the discourse.

⬐ jonnycomputer

Discounting Amazon's grip on the cloud computing sector is a mistake.

⬐ after_care

It’s not accurate to say Google has a monopoly on the “internet discoverability” information network.

Bing and yahoo contain near equal information networks and Google isn’t dominate in many important Asian regions.

⬐ laurent92

Of course. Trust-busting has always been part of liberalism.

The idea of liberalism has always been to avoid monopolies, which government is just one form of. The government’s role should be reduced to the minimum, police-army-justice-currency, and even the last one is up for a debate. So the government’s role is to stay small, and make companies stay small enough.

Unfortunately this flew away in 2001 wehn Microsoft had been condemned, but not sentenced, because after 9/11, USA needed their companies to reign upon the rest of the world. Maybe time has come to admit that US reigning on the rest of the world hurt the domestic market with too-large-monopolies, and maybe it is time to come back to a competition market.

⬐ thou42o34324

I'm surprised you don't mention FAANG's egregious censorship.

It's like we're living in some global Orwellian dystopia or some Communist dictatorship.

⬐ sanderjd

I know this is the inevitable and cliche pushback, but it never seems to be grappled with so it remains worth pointing out: none of the three things you mentioned are anywhere close to monopolies. There are lots of social networks (Twitter and TikTok are extremely successful, among others), lots of ways to search the internet, and lots of ways to shop online. The analogy with the railroads simply is not apt, their monopoly was so powerful because there was often no other way to get from point A to point B, so they had complete leverage. This is not the case for any of these companies you listed, there is a lot of competition in all these markets.

But I also think there are major issues with the current configuration of the tech industry! They just aren't because of monopolies. It is not helpful to misdiagnose a real problem. It is not helpful to have only a hammer and call every problem a nail.

⬐ HWR_14

The question posed by the monopolies is not "are these the only options". But do these wield too much market power to be controlled by the market. That is, sure, Bing and DDG make up 5% of the global search, but is that enough. Yes, people use Twitter and TikTok, but does that replace the social graph of FB? Yes, I can buy directly online from many places, but if people are going to Amazon instead of Google to search for prices does it matter?

So, my question to you, if every non-Google search engine published their formula for rankings, and SEO for going up all their rankings was mutually exclusive with going up in Google's rankings, do you believe any site would implement them?

I doubt anyone would trade higher status on every other engine for lower status on Google. And in that case, they may as well be a monopoly.

⬐ oconnor663

I don't know what the formal definitions of any of these things are, but I assume (hope?) that it's important not to equate being successful with being a monopoly by definition. If Ford came out with an amazing new car tomorrow, and suddenly 95% of new cars purchased were Fords, we probably shouldn't initiate trust-busting action against Ford on that basis alone. We want car companies to try to capture market share by making better cars.

I don't know exactly how we contend with this definitional problem, but intuitively I think it should have something to do with prices and behavior. For example, if we were a fly on the wall in a Google exec meeting, we might be curious about whether they're jacking up the price of ads because they know no one can compete with them, or whether they're sensitive to charging more than their smaller competitors do. If they're behaving like their competitors are a serious threat, then intuitively they're probably not a monopoly, and it probably doesn't make sense to trust-bust them.

But anyway I'm not a lawyer, and I don't know what the current thinking is about any of this stuff.

⬐ HWR_14

> suddenly 95% of new cars purchased were Fords, we probably shouldn't initiate trust-busting action against Ford on that basis alone.

Antitrust law isn't about stopping people from accumulating a dominant position. It's about stopping people from using that dominant position to maintain itself or to spread to other areas. Ford produces the "Amazing Car" that everyone wants, costs $1, etc. great! When Ford uses an RFID reader to force it to only fill up at Ford Gas Stations antitrust steps in. The issue isn't that Google is the dominant search engine, but that it uses that to become dominant in ads. It's not that YouTube is dominant in video, but that uses that to encourage people to download Chrome.

⬐ kfarr

Yes Google was able to catapult YouTube playback pages in all Google search results after acquisition, just one example

⬐ sjtindell

Good take, very much agree. That’s why so many of the antitrust work against Google/FB, etc. has focused on acquisitions. They become successful, then use their data and infinite money printers to buy anyone who would compete.

⬐ bmitc

The Justice department has some good documentation.

https://www.justice.gov/atr/competition-and-monopoly-single-...

⬐ bumby

This is interesting because it defines monopoly and market power in terms of prices. How does the traditional monopoly definition fit when we're talking about "free" goods (to the general consumer) like FB or Google search? Is the thought that they exert too much power over ad pricing?

⬐ sanderjd

It doesn't fit. The point is that we need new regulatory language that does fit.

⬐ bumby

Is there a proposed new language/definition? The article's discussion still seems to be centered on price.

"her paper highlights how the consumer welfare view of antitrust fails to curb the predatory pricing".

I said it elsewhere, but I not against the idea of trust-busting, but the industry analogies typically brought up don't really fit. The closest I can find in general discussion is that the services are a public good, but we tolerate/promote monopolies in those sectors (like utilities).

⬐ sanderjd

Agreed. I don't think there are really any mainstream alternative proposals in the policy sphere, at least not that I've seen. I've seen technologists grapple with what might make sense, like Ben Thompson for instance, but they don't seem to have the ear of government actors. Which is why I'm so frustrated by the conflation with monopoly regulation. It is actively a distraction to the policy discussion. Every time they go to Congress, there is all this focus on "breaking them up", but it's all just really misguided and beside the point, and I blame the monopoly confusion for that.

⬐ bumby

What do you think is a better way to frame the policy discussion? I assume they use the monopoly angle (perhaps in a misguided fashion) because it is a tried-and-true template for regulating corporations with too much power.

⬐ sanderjd

Yes, that is why, but they are wrong.

A better framing would be to focus on specific problems: "Facebook owning both facebook.com and Instagram and both Messenger and WhatsApp give them too much market power in social sharing and messaging, so Instagram and WhatsApp should be spun back out", "Amazon should not be able to use sales metrics of other platform sellers to inform their own product development", etc. Identify market issues, figure out regulatory language that speaks to those issues.

But "big companies are monopolies that must be broken up" is unhelpfully reductive.

⬐ bumby

I agree with you, and I'm just following up for a finer point.

It's my understanding the whole intent of anti-trust is consumer welfare. The connection between Amazon and pricing/competition seems to be a straight-forward connection between hurting consumer welfare and its market power in terms of Amazon's market power. But where does the connection come in between consumer welfare and the social media apps? I.e., how does FB hurt me by having the most/best information regarding my social network?

Or is your stance it shouldn't be framed in terms of consumer welfare at all?

⬐ sanderjd

Yeah I don't really buy the consumer welfare framing. Or maybe I do buy it for existing anti trust regulation. But I don't buy that it is the only thing we (as a society) should be looking at when considering regulation of companies. This isn't novel, we regulate other externalities even when the regulations themselves harm consumers in the direct sense. For instance, more environmental regulations result in higher prices. But they are often good for other reasons, like not poisoning drinking water. We just don't use anti trust regulation to do this.

Basically I just don't see anti trust regulation as being the best way to target the diverse set of issues society sees with the big tech companies of the moment.

⬐ huitzitziltzin

This is a fascinating and unresolved question in antitrust economics, but explains why very few people in the profession think FB is a monopoly. And indeed - the FTCs failure to make a plausible market definition argument which showed why FB was a monopoly in that market is why the FTC got slapped by the judge in January of this year.

~Antitrust Economist.

⬐ tablespoon

> I don't know what the formal definitions of any of these things are, but I assume (hope?) that it's important not to equate being successful with being a monopoly by definition. If Ford came out with an amazing new car tomorrow, and suddenly 95% of new cars purchased were Fords, we probably shouldn't initiate trust-busting action against Ford on that basis alone. We want car companies to try to capture market share by making better cars.

There's an important difference between "capturing market share" and "capturing too much the market share." If Ford's going to put its competitors out of business, turn them into niche players, or even just get into a position where it can rest on its laurels for a few decades, our primary concern is no longer making sure Ford can be rewarded. Honestly, I don't see the downside of regularly breaking up a #1 player with too much market share into successors that are the #2 and #3 payers (and forcing major shareholders to divest one or the other). I want companies to be competing to get to the top, but once they get there, give them a prize for their effort and send them back down.

From my experience as a customer, Amazon's e-commerce operation hasn't improved much (e.g. their search is still as shitty as ever) and has arguably regressed in many ways (e.g. more shady products and fake reviews) in the last decade. That's pretty strong signal to me that they're not under enough competitive pressure.

⬐ huitzitziltzin

> There's an important difference between "capturing market share" and "capturing too much the market share."

No. Not in the economics of antitrust. There is no "too much market share" threshold. Unless consumer welfare is harmed there is no reason to complain that a firm is "too big."

> From my experience as a customer, Amazon's e-commerce operation hasn't improved much (e.g. their search is still as shitty as ever) and has arguably regressed in many ways (e.g. more shady products and fake reviews) in the last decade. That's pretty strong signal to me that they're not under enough competitive pressure.

So go elsewhere! That's how competition should work. Among your other alternatives are Walmart and Target, which have quite robust online operations.

Amazon is not plausibly a monopoly.

⬐ tablespoon

> No. Not in the economics of antitrust. There is no "too much market share" threshold. Unless consumer welfare is harmed there is no reason to complain that a firm is "too big."

Consumers are harmed by a "too big" firm that's under little to no pressure to improve its products. The retort to that usually "wait a few decades until the market sorts that out," but frankly, I could be dead by then.

Another poster addressed how the "consumer welfare" standard is not so much an economic argument, but rather a legal enforcement framework. I see little mechanism for consumer welfare to be harmed by the creation of multiple successor companies that all share the same successful formula of the "too big" firm but now have to compete with one another.

⬐ int_19h

The "consumer welfare" standard is a fairly recent (1980s) reinterpretation, and the switch to it happened because of large business lobbying. The original intent of American trust-busting laws was very much to prevent capturing so much market share that competition becomes irrelevant.

https://promarket.org/2019/09/05/how-robert-bork-fathered-th...

And that original interpretation was what worked on the original monopolies (oil etc). The sooner we get back to that, the better.

⬐ cornellwright

Amazon's search is so bad that it's almost certainly intentional in order to get customers to look at more products. This is a great example of them using their monopoly power to increase their revenue to the detriment of consumers.

For an idea of what it could be, try the search on electronic component distributor sites like Digikey[1] and Newark[2]. They are both improving their search in order to attract more customers benefiting all customers in the process.

Try to find a 34 inch 1080p monitor with both VGA and DisplayPort inputs on Amazon and you'll find yourself reading hundreds of monitor product pages. If Amazon had serious competition you could probably find and buy one in 5 or 6 clicks, or easily determine that such a combination of features doesn't exist.

[1] https://www.digikey.com/ [2] https://www.newark.com/

⬐ hakfoo

I have to wonder if it's fundamentally appealing to a different type of customer.

You don't window-shop Digi-key. You're pretty much buying on spec sheets alone. I want to see all 330 ohm 1/4 watt through-hole resistors, now sort by price and availability in the quantity I need, then maybe discard products that don't meet some other criteria that I can't directly filter for. There's very little chance of making a sale through a slicker marketing campaign.

Conversely, people buying a single monitor might be browsing, potentially swayed by the right language and graphics on the landing pages. I'm pretty sure those bloody finches sold more ViewSonic monitors than any other aspect of their product line. For a window-shopping customer, getting the customer to see as many of them as possible improves their chances of a sale.

On the other hand, I will concur that Amazon's search is a disaster for computer products. I suspect it's also terrible in other verticals that have clear, well-defined "faceted search" concepts, but we probably have the most experience with that one here. I suspect it may be a casualty of their broadness of categories-- why spend the labour to provide really killer search if it hasn't proven to be an impediment to sales yet?

⬐ fshbbdssbbgdd

I’m skeptical that making users spend a long time trying to find the right monitor would actually be good for Amazon’s revenue or that Amazon would intentionally optimize for it. If the typical user really experienced that struggle, many would probably give up without making a purchase.

To hazard a guess, I’d speculate that apparent poor quality of search results is more likely Amazon trying to push customers toward items where Amazon earns more margin. The average customer probably just buys the first/cheapest result and isn’t going to spend hours scouring the product pages. There’s a lot of complexity in Amazon’s relationships with suppliers, fee structure, and warehouses/logistics that could affect the revenue-optimizing search ranking but isn’t obvious to the user.

⬐ PixyMisa

Amazon has ads in search results.

⬐ cornellwright

Amazon deliberately leading users to a suboptimal product because they get more margin seems like exactly the sort of thing that competition should help to resolve (or at least limit). The fact that search is so bad is probably evidence of too little competition.

⬐ huitzitziltzin

> But do these wield too much market power to be controlled by the market. That is, sure, Bing and DDG make up 5% of the global search, but is that enough.

This is exactly what antitrust law should not punish. Google has a large market share of search because it offers a good product. Antitrust law should preserve competition without punishing success.

People are free to use alternatives, including Bing. If they don't, that doesn't make Google a monopoly (which indeed in search they are not). It makes Google successful! (Though it is a successful firm which does occasionally violate antitrust laws in other areas and should be punished for that.)

⬐ HWR_14

The point is that Google used their search dominance to push YouTube. Then their YouTube dominance to say "this site works better in Chrome" to push Chrome. Then their Chrome and Search Dominance to push AMP.

It's not that Google should be punished. It's that they should be stopped from using one product line to prop up another.

⬐ inetknght

> Google has a large market share of search because it offers a good product

No. Google has a large market share of search because it got in early, presented some synergistic products, heavily biased search results towards its own products to reinforce that, heavily gamed advertising bidding in its favor, placed anti-competitive requirements on hardware manufacturers of Android devices, and locked-in consumers' data so that competitors couldn't access it until it was forced by governments to allow consumers to download a copy.

Google, and Alphabet, do not today offer good products. I can go on for hours describing many years-long problems with the product offerings; culminating in my complete non-use of Google as a search engine because its results are so poor, stopped using Google News because of its tracking and curation biases, stopped using Google Mail because of its inability to provide filters that automatically mark emails as spam, stopped using Google Drive because it actively prevents many features from working in Firefox, and ... well the list can go on but I have better things to do.

⬐ anamax

> No. Google has a large market share of search because it got in early

"got in early" compared to what?

There were dozens of search engines before Google.

⬐ mywittyname

You're right on the technicals, but the GP is right in spirit.

It seems like society needs a term for the concept of a company accumulating far too much power, and that we need laws similar to anti-trust laws, that apply to these companies. This is an incredibly difficult problem to address specifically because FB is not a classic monopoly. I'm not even sure what it would mean to "break them up".

Amazon, MS, Apple, and Google are all far easier to split up. Each company has logical seams to split at (i.e., aws/retail, gcp/search/android, itunes/devices, etc). You could split FB and insta, but that doesn't really curb FB's power and influence at all.

⬐ nitrogen

In Facebook's case they own some of their biggest potential competitors for attention and deliberately preserve their niches. So splitting them up might make a difference. But if not, requiring an open network akin to the telephone system with standardized protocols might make a difference.

AT&T was split on geographical lines, so maybe FB could be as well, and the regionals would all have to interoperate with open protocols that would allow for regional competitors.

⬐ sanderjd

For what it's worth, I think splitting up Facebook makes very little sense, but that requiring open protocols would be an excellent direction. A big reason I have a problem with the "monopoly" framing is that it limits the options for how to fix it to pretty much just this "break it up" idea, which isn't the right tool for the job.

⬐ nitrogen

Splitting Oculus, Instagram, and WhatsApp kind of makes sense.

⬐ sanderjd

I agree, but that's not actually what people are mostly thinking about when they say to split up facebook. They mean facebook itself. But it's not clear what that even means to most people.

⬐ delackner

I see geographical splitting being pushed in a few places, but this is a really anachronistic vision of what would really benefit consumers. Even back in the phone days, regional monopolies didn't turn out to be a net win. It just meant that each of those new mini-monopolies dominated their region.

The right way to think about this is what kind of splitting would produce the most competitive landscape. We have a really successful example in the way that ISP competition has played out in various markets.

The US has regional ISP near monopolies in gigabit fiber, since the infrastructural outlay is so expensive. This is analogous to the moat FB has from building a vast and deeply connected network graph.

The ISP outcome has been that the US mostly pays extraordinarily high prices for substandard service.

Other countries have avoided this trap by regulating the enforced splitting of the network itself and the service provider. Since building out the physical network (the fiber, or the friend graph) is extremely hard, great that is a natural monopoly. Maybe you might get a couple of huge players, but the barrier to entry for new players is nearly insurmountable.

Each network graph / fiber provider is required by law to offer access to their network to third party service providers who you can contract with to provide you internet service over the network.

Japan for instance has this setup, with a handful of players that have built national (or regional) fiber networks, and when you buy service, you have a split bill. Part of it goes to pay for access to the physical network. The other part is to pay for an ISP that is routing your packets over the network.

I think this is the proper solution for FB. Break the company apart between the network graph provider, and the CLIENT layer. Let third parties provide their own friend graph client with features that people want.

Then you would see a flowering of competition as people feel free to try the client experience they prefer. * How about chronological news feed? * no ads, but paying your interconnect cost by making you pay a subscription * fine grained control of how many stories you ever see from specific over-talkative people. * delivering a subset of your friends' stories only on keyword-matched topics / hiding all stories that match specific topics.

I am not hopeful the technologically illiterate people writing the decisions will understand this though. Geographic splitting is nonsensical for a graph that is inherently global.

⬐ nitrogen

I don't think geographical partitioning is necessarily the right approach, but it would at least force an interoperability/federation protocol to exist, which could (as it did in the phone networks, and as you suggest for clients) allow competing clients and networks to interface with the original network.

⬐ dont__panic

Open protocols and interop seem like a very good goal to aim for. I'm curious how geographical lines would work for Facebook -- would you end up with one Facebook per country? And would we still end up in a situation where you need to have a Facebook account to participate in things like Marketplace or community groups?

Personally I would want to be able to host my own tiny Facebook instance that I control. Ideally I could even invite friends and family to share my ad-free self-hosted instance with a chronological newsfeed setup.

⬐ vntx

Can’t you already do this? Host your own social networks, I mean. Of course, the hard part is getting others to join it. Isn’t that why protocols like Matrix and decentralized social media platforms like Mastodon were made? So you could communicate with anyone you wanted to on any other platform as long as they implemented the open protocols.

⬐ francoi8

The larger a company becomes, the more it should be regulated.

⬐ bumby

Larger in terms of what? Market share? Revenue? Profit margin? Staffing?

⬐ romwell

Yes.

⬐ bumby

All of the above or any one of the above? How would one measure how each of those contributes to market power?

I can't tell if you have a reasonably thought out perspective based on your response or if it's just "corporations that are 'big' suck"

⬐ sanderjd

I agree with this. My point is merely that the current problems are a round peg that it is unwise to try to fit into the square hole of existing anti-trust regulation.

⬐ SpicyLemonZest

Isn't the term just "too powerful"? It seems to me that the reason we don't have laws against companies being too powerful is that most people don't think it's a big deal for companies to be too powerful, as long as they're not monopolies.

⬐ Nasrudith

Well yes but that term is too honest for its own good as a matter of opinion. "Too powerful" is an absolutely arbitrary standard with no desire for internal consistency. Which is exactly the opposite of what you want in laws.

⬐ SpicyLemonZest

I agree with what you're saying, but that's exactly the problem. I don't think the author of the source article has a clear, internally consistent standard, and I don't think any consistent standard exists that would tell you Google and Facebook need to be broken up but CVS and Costco don't.

⬐ lotsofpulp

If people thought an entity was “too powerful”, then they would want a law against the entity, otherwise the word “too” does not mean anything.

The reason there is no law against being “too powerful” is because it is a nebulous description that is not enforceable in a fair manner.

⬐ alisonkisk

Antitrust law is law against being too powerful.

⬐ SpicyLemonZest

I kinda fundamentally reject the premise here. When I say that a sandwich is "too expensive", I don't mean that there ought to be a law against selling sandwiches for that price.

⬐ lotsofpulp

The context is dealing with the problem of the existence of a too powerful company. Dealing with a too expensive sandwich requires no laws.

⬐ Stupulous

If refusing to work with a company is impossible, it's a monopoly, right? Otherwise, you are free to respond to the too-powerful company the same way you respond to the too-expensive sandwich.

If a company is using its power to do something harmful, write laws against the harmful thing, irrespective of how much power the company has. Illegalizing shadow profiles of non-users would be a good step forward, illegalizing them only for FB-sized companies would be less good.

If a handful of companies are operating as a monopoly, that's already well-defined as an oligopoly.

I think the only other situation where a company can be too powerful is if they get too much power over the regulators. I expect it's rare to get there without becoming a monopoly or oligopoly, but it's probably not impossible.

⬐ lotsofpulp

>If a company is using its power to do something harmful, write laws against the harmful thing, irrespective of how much power the company has.

I agree, hence my explanation of why there are no laws against "too powerful" companies. It is not an actionable condition.

⬐ bumby

This isn't a new problem though. Anti-trust laws have been enforced previously without a strict definition.

"Although the courts "have not yet identified a precise level at which monopoly power will be inferred"[1]

[1]Section of Antitrust Law, Am. Bar Ass'n, Market Power Handbook 19­20 (2005).

⬐ ZeroGravitas

I was going to reply to the parent that we used to have a word for this, and that word is "monopoly", but apparently we now no longer have that shared definition, probably an intentional confusion bought at great expense by monopolists.

⬐ dahfizz

At no point has "monopoly" meant anything other than "A single seller". The confusion comes from people trying to steal that term to refer to "big companies".

⬐ ZeroGravitas

Monopoly means one seller in the same way that a spherical cow has no friction.

When modelling monopolies economists posit one seller that can set the price because it's simple. Similarly, perfectly competitive markets have an infinite number of competeing firms.

In the real world, monopoly has never been as black and white as that e.g. if someone was granted a monopoly on selling salt, that didn't immediately strike anyone selling salt with a lightning bolt, it just meant you couldn't build an actual business on it since you could hit legal issues.

Similarly, people accused of being monopolies argue that the "market" is bigger (do planes and trains compete for long distance travel?) in a way that is fuzzy and human.

But the bigger issue is how do you tell the difference between someone who doesn't understand something, and someone who refuses to understand something? People pretended that climate change wasn't happening for 3 decades and counting to protect big corporations, so really there's no limit to what their influence can buy.

⬐ Supermancho

> The confusion comes from people trying to steal that term to refer to "big companies".

This is an oligopoly. Because companies are arbitrary constructs, it's a defacto monopoly by multiple sellers. The terminology is useful, but not in the sense that it is then end-all of qualification.

⬐ dahfizz

To claim big companies == oligopoly == monopoly is objectively wrong, and the opposite of useful terminology.

⬐ Supermancho

"big companies" were in quotes because there was context. This implies "too big to fail" or "big enough to trigger antitrust talks", et al.

Collusion often results in this, which is not a dejour monopoly, but a defacto monopoly. Collusion isn't even strictly necessary. Endstage capitalism naturally selects the winners who stay on top. It's a simple concept taught in beginning economics.

"big companies" == oligopoly == monopoly is exactly what people mean when talking about worrisome "big companies", without the commensurate analogies.

A monopoly is about perspective which is about scale not some subjective definition (like sanderjd endlessly trolls about). Legal systems all over the world combat real/threatened monopolies (eg the CCP recently acted unilaterally) in various forms. Whether you think it's a useful reasoning to group companies and use a specific term is irrelevant. I sincerely hope you can understand that.

Good luck with whatever.

⬐ sanderjd

I truly feel like I just read a paragraph from 1984. You're tying yourself in knots to rationalize using language to mean something you want it to mean, but which it does not actually mean.

Yes, oligopoly is a fine word to use, but you can't just wave your hands around to transmute that into monopoly.

⬐ Supermancho

> You're tying yourself in knots to rationalize using language to mean something you want it to mean,

Nope. Context matters.

⬐ laurent92

Inheritance. That’s the term you are looking for.

In many countries, we still tax it 65%, to ensure a one-time success doesn’t become a “monopoly” of some families over generations.

Likewise for companies. we can’t tax them per generation, but the monopoly laws are here to dismantle them if they keep hold on a market without ongoing “coup de maître” on innovation.

⬐ arrosenberg

> It seems like society needs a term for the concept of a company accumulating far too much power, and that we need laws similar to anti-trust laws, that apply to these companies.

Our forebears have us covered! Antitrust became the popular term, but back in the Gilded Age, it was often referred to as anti-consolidation. I think that is an excellent term for it.

⬐ hardtke

The monopoly is not on the consumer side, it is on the advertising side. Google and Facebook are the only companies that have access to data on basically every sale on the internet (almost every site that uses their ad tools reports back their sales). This data gives them a defensible duopoly on digital advertising.

⬐ sanderjd

This argument makes way more sense, but it is also not well handled by existing anti-trust law and a much better response would be new regulation.

Edit: It also doesn't speak to any of the issues with Amazon. (Also interestingly, Amazon's own advertising business is increasingly making this a tri-opoly.)

⬐ spaced-out

> Google and Facebook are the only companies that have access to data on basically every sale on the internet

Amazon? eBay? WeChat?

⬐ hardtke

Sites report their data back to Google analytics and Facebook by implementing their pixels. People don't do this for Amazon, ebay, wechat.

⬐ sanderjd

Amazon actually does have a quickly growing ads business FWIW.

⬐ awillen

This right here. I own an e-commerce business, and I sell on Amazon, but I do about 10x the revenue on my own site that I do on Amazon.

I'm in no way unique in this regard - for all of the talk of how much Amazon dominates e-commerce, the reality is that it's never been easier to successfully run your own e-commerce site (just look at Shopify's market cap).

Sure, if you're selling totally commoditized goods that's a different story, but even there you've got substantial enough web presences from retailers like Walmart and Target that Amazon still can't reasonably be called a monopoly.

⬐ SkeuomorphicBee

> The analogy with the railroads simply is not apt, their monopoly was so powerful because there was often no other way to get from point A to point B, so they had complete leverage.

I still believe the analogy holds, just substitute geographical points A and B with person A and person B (or business A to potential client B), and the similarities are obviously clear. There is often no other way to get from person A to person B than to use Facebook, or from person C to D without Twitter, ... . Yes, there are various social networks, but there was also various railway barons. Just like the railway was not a single nationwide monopoly, but instead a series of smaller regional monopolies, a single social network is not an all encompassing internet-wide monopoly, but instead a monopoly lording over a subgroup.

⬐ sanderjd

There is absolutely other ways to get between those people in all those cases. That's exactly why it doesn't hold.

⬐ monetus

Speaking in absolutes, you absolutely could go door to door and hope to find me, but for say, my class in highschool, FB would be their only reasonable way.

⬐ dane-pgp

You could also walk between point A and point B, but that doesn't mean that rail monopolies aren't a problem.

⬐ sanderjd

There are other equivalent ways. Using iMessage is not like walking compared to Messenger, it's just parallel railroad tracks.

⬐ dane-pgp

Dividing your attention between two different messaging apps is more than twice as inconvenient/costly as having just one. If the first company to lay tracks could force later companies to charge double for journeys along their parallel tracks, then that would be a clearly anti-competitive situation.

The situation is even worse with messaging apps than with railroads, though, since there is a coordination problem between customers/users of each service, rather than each customer/user being able to make their choice of service in isolation. It's very hard for a messaging service to compete if it requires users to ruin the experience of not just themselves but also at least one of their friends.

⬐ sanderjd

It is not worse at all. Have you ever seen the movie There Will Be Blood? The local railroad monopolies were used to drive competitors out of other markets, like oil, by cutting off the ability of those market participants to transport their products. Getting multiple messaging notifications from different apps is not anywhere within the same ballpark as this...

It's really just so insane that the complaint being ascribed to monopoly power is that it's a tad inconvenient to use the many freely available competitive products. Yeah! That's what a market that isn't monopolized is like! There are lots of competing products, which is often less convenient than if everyone were using a single monopoly product!

⬐ dane-pgp

> Have you ever seen the movie There Will Be Blood?

Nope. Have you ever read the article "Facebook is censoring links to competitor social network Tsu and deleting old mentions"?[0]

> There are lots of competing products, which is often less convenient than if everyone were using a single monopoly product!

If I drive a Ford then it doesn't inconvenience me if someone else drives a Honda. This is equivalent to a market where messengers use an interoperable protocol, like email. The "less convenient" world you are describing is one where some roads can only be driven on by Ford cars, and others only by Hondas, causing people to choose their destinations based on which make of car they have.

[0] https://boingboing.net/2015/11/06/facebook-is-censoring-link...

⬐ sanderjd

You are seriously overemphasizing the import of very minor inconveniences. The world doesn't owe you a maximally convenient well integrated instant messaging ecosystem!

I think it's very lame that Facebook would censor links to a competing site (if that is indeed what they're doing, which I'm happy to stipulate), but Facebook is not in any way the only way for people to see links to that site. Contemporary society provides that site a ridiculously giant number of ways to get the word out. There are lots of other sites where people can share the links, they can buy ads in articles, they can optimize to appear in search results, they can encourage people to share by word of mouth in messaging, email, and real life, they can buy billboards or ads in subway cars or lots of other things. I am not exaggerating when I say that it has never been easier to get the word out about something. That doesn't mean it's easy, it's just that it's always been hard and it's much easier now. This is why advertising has always been big business.

The Facebook of today didn't exist when Facebook was new. How did they ever get the word out and get engagement? They figured out other ways! Facebook is just not a necessary component of spreading the word about a new site. It's very useful, but also very possible to route around it.

⬐ dane-pgp

> The world doesn't owe you a maximally convenient well integrated instant messaging ecosystem!

The world also doesn't owe Facebook monopoly power over people's social graphs either, and yet Facebook is able to wield that to some extent. In case you think that this is something that Facebook achieved on its own merits, rather than being granted by society/government, it's worth considering the extent to which copyright and hacking laws are used to prevent interoperability.[0]

More generally, though, I believe that profit-seeking corporations should only exist to serve society, and therefore corporations do owe us minimally inconvenient products, however we decide to define "inconvenient" (and taking into account society's other goals, such as employment).

> it has never been easier to get the word out about something.

I think that is a reasonable assumption, but I think it's also true that it's never been easier to travel anywhere in the world, and yet local monopolies of railroads are still bad for society and should be regulated against.

[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...

⬐ PoignardAzur

> There is often no other way to get from person A to person B than to use Facebook, or from person C to D without Twitter, ... . Yes, there are various social networks, but there was also various railway barons

Is that really accurate, though?

How many people use a single social network? And regarding market power, very few companies do their online marketing on a single social network; they usually have a general strategy that they deploy on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.

⬐ nitrogen

My neighborhood's official presence is only on Facebook, apparently. I don't actively use Facebook, so I have no access to my group of neighbors.

⬐ monetus

Anecdote: facebook is the only social network where I am listed under my actual name. Until some highly adopted internet address book exists, the only option for many old friends to contact me is FB at this point.

⬐ throwaway894345

The obvious problem with considering social network platforms as interchangeable competitors is that they... aren't interchangeable at all. A user can't pack up and go to a different platform because their actual social network (i.e., relationships between humans) is only accessible on one platform.

For example, my colleagues are on Twitter but not Mastodon. I can't leave Twitter without leaving my social network. Why does Twitter own access to my colleagues? Why should we allow that to be a competitive advantage? It's certainly at-odds with the principle of innovation--you're not on a platform because it's more innovative than another platform, you're on it because they have a monopoly on your social network.

Contrary to your claim, there's very little competition in these markets because corporate ownership of user social networks is an enormous moat. Not only can users not easily move to another platform, but advertisers can't easily spend their money on some new platform because the new platform is much smaller in all likelihood.

⬐ dahfizz

This is a definition that is broad to the point of uselessness.

Regardless of what program I use to communicate with my friends, that program is now a monopoly. Even if I coded up the website myself and my friends and I are the only ones to use it, that website now "owns access" to all my friends. It is absurd to label this website a monopoly.

This is also not actionable. Once my friends and I all decide on a communication platform, that platform is a monopoly and must be broken up (?), by removing some of my friends from the platform (?). In that way, it would literally be impossible for me to have a platform where I can communicate with all my friends, because such a platform would be a monopoly and must be broken up by your definition.

⬐ throwaway894345

1. No one cares about monopolies on tiny markets.

2. It's perfectly actionable: open protocols separate the platform and the network.

⬐ mikkergp

The 'my colleagues are on twitter by not mastodon' example doesn't feel salient to me. The best example would probably be MMORPG's. Should people who play WoW have access to people who play FFIV? I guess the question would be is social networking more a communications utility like a cell phone or e-mail, or is it more of a recreational activity. Personally I've never felt like not being on facebook took access away from my friends the way not having a phone would. Oddly no one talks about LinkedIn being a monopoly which feels like a more substantive example, since not being on LinkedIn may impact job opportunities. But not being on facebook, instagram, or twitter feels more like I won't be able to recreate with my friends/family and less like I won't be able to communicate with them.

⬐ throwaway894345

I think the MMORPG example is off for a few reasons:

1. The primary product of an MMORPG isn’t access to a social network.

2. The social networks in these games is far smaller than social media platforms (we don’t usually worry about anti-trust for tiny markets)

3. As you mentioned, social media platforms are communications/infrastructure, not recreation.

⬐ dane-pgp

> 1. The primary product of an MMORPG isn’t access to a social network.

Exactly. You can switch to another MMORPG and find another level 29 healer to restore your HP, but if your mother only uses Facebook, it's much harder to switch to a different social network and find another woman who gave birth to you.

⬐ joe_the_user

But I also think there are major issues with the current configuration of the tech industry! They just aren't because of monopolies. It is not helpful to misdiagnose a real problem. It is not helpful to have only a hammer and call every problem a nail.

Yeah, the situation involves a contradictory litany of complaints. Google/Facebook/etc are terrible because they suppress free speech and terrible because they allow it. They're terrible because monopolize online advertising and terrible because they facilitate it.

The purpose of breaking up a monopoly is to allow competition to facilitate the provisioning of whatever good a monopoly provides. Lots of people imagine breaking up or regulating Facebook will prevent the variety of abuses that we see. But if you look at the "competitive Internet", you can observe a sea of garbage in the form of endless popups, malware and eCommerce fraud. Things seem little more thought-out than "I want this to stop", which is hardly a recipe for constructive change.

⬐ ncallaway

> none of the three things you mentioned are anywhere close to monopolies.

I think it depends on what you consider "the market" to be.

If I want to compare Amazon to the "Global Retail Market" (Amazon's preferred framing), then maybe they aren't in a monopolistic position.

But I—as ab individual—don't participate in the Global Retail Market. I participate in the "online US retail" and "Pacific Northwest retail" market. So I don't get much benefit out of there being more competition to Amazon in France, so the "Global Retail Market" doesn't seem like it's always the right framing. For me, it's still the case that Amazon doesn't feel like a monopoly, but I could imagine areas where Amazon is much closer to being one of just a small number of options for many products.

Similarly, I'm sure Facebook wants to be evaluated against _all_ communication media, but again I want to communicate with people in my immediate network. If 100% of my social network and business contacts used exclusively Facebook for communication, then from _my_ perspective Facebook might have a monopoly on my communication options (even if they have real competition in China from competitors).

I'm not so convinced that we should just accept the broadest possible interpretation of "the market" that we should evaluate as the correct framing. From the perspective of some individuals, if there is only a single dominant option, then that person still needs to deal with anti-trust issues.

It's similar to the way some of the major internet players will carve up the country into regions of fairly exclusive offerings. Across US broadband, the market may be divided amongst a number of different players such that it doesn't appear to be a monopoly. But when you zoom in to an individual municipality, it might be that there _is_ a monopoly at that level, and the competition that appears to exist in the "national market" is actual a union of separate monopolies (and other regions where there is actual competition).

So, while I totally agree with you that under the legal definitions of monopolies, many of these entities are not there, under individuals _practical_ definition of monopolies, many of these entities _are_ monopolistic.

⬐ sanderjd

> I think it depends on what you consider "the market" to be.

It honestly doesn't. None of these are monopolies by any market definition.

Amazon has so many competitors: brick and mortar stores like Walmart and Target and Best Buy remain successful, online competitors again like Walmart and Target and Best Buy but also Ebay and in a different way Shopify and others, are also successful.

Your argument is slightly stronger in the case of Facebook, but still very weak. Facebook's social networks have strong direct competition in Twitter and TikTok. Facebook's communication platforms have strong competitors in iMessage, SMS apps, Signal, Telegram, Discord, etc.

I'm not 'accept[ing] the broadest possible interpretation of "the market"', I'm just not accepting hand-wavy non-definitions of "market" that only include a single company so that it can be called a monopoly by definition.

Again, I think there are major problems and I favor new regulations for all of those problems. But what I don't think makes sense at all is redefining "monopoly" in a way that makes no sense, just because anti-trust law is our only extant tool for solving the problems caused by enormous tech firms.

⬐ Supermancho

> It honestly doesn't.

You contradict yourself in the next breadth, implying that the market is something bigger than suggested.

> None of these are monopolies by any market definition.

So you're quibbling over a line in the sand, but "what the market is defined as" matters, regardless because the concept of "monopoly" or some precursor has to be measured within bounds.

⬐ mrkurt

Antitrust is much broader than "monopolies". It's all about concentrated power. Saying "monopoly" is just shorthand for market power, it's not a binary definition.

⬐ dahfizz

"monopoly", "monopoly power", and "market power" all have related but very much distinct definitions.

This is how the justice department defines them: https://www.justice.gov/atr/competition-and-monopoly-single-...

⬐ huitzitziltzin

>Antitrust is much broader than "monopolies".

Yes.

> It's all about concentrated power.

No, absolutely not. There are many activities which violate antitrust law which have nothing to do with "concentrated power". Nor is "concentrated power" something which is banned in antitrust law (because it isn't clear what it is!).

~ Antitrust economist

⬐ sanderjd

> Antitrust is much broader than "monopolies".

I'm with you here.

> Saying "monopoly" is just shorthand for market power, it's not a binary definition.

No, the word "monopoly" has an actual definition.

⬐ colinmhayes

You can waste time on semantics or you accept that practically everyone means "company that abuses their overwhelming market power to create friction in the market" when they say monopoly.

⬐ sanderjd

It isn't semantics. You want to use the word monopoly to mean something different than what it means. Feel free to make the more nuanced point about "abusing market power", but if you're building your argument around the word monopoly, you need to be using that word to mean what it means.

⬐ colinmhayes

I mean I agree, just pointing out that you're not really convincing anyone here and complaining about this isn't very productive since you, I, and everyone else here understands what is meant.

⬐ sanderjd

I seriously doubt that's true. I'm sure I'm not convincing any of the people debating me in their own comments, but there are always other people reading the debate, who don't have as strong of preconceptions as the people commenting, and I suspect at least a few such people have thought to themselves "hmmm, yeah, he's right, those don't seem like monopolies". (I'm sure there are people being convinced of the opposite too.) It's a mistake to think the audience for a public discussion is limited to the people commenting.

Edit to add: And to the "everyone knows what is meant". No, that's not true, lots of people have become confused by the usage of the word "monopoly" to describe the issues with big tech companies, through its pervasive usage in congressional hearings and media. Using confusing inaccurate language is not harmless, it confuses the debate.

⬐ stale2002

> mean something different than what it means.

Literally this is semantics. Literally, you are arguing about the definition of a word. So yes, by definition, you are quit literally arguing about what a word means, which is semantics.

That's what the word "semantics" means.

⬐ sanderjd

This is fair enough, but by saying "you're just arguing semantics", the implication is that it does not matter what words are used and what they mean. And I described why I do think it matters (in summary: the use of the word monopoly for this argument really does confuse people about what the problem is). So I'm debating semantics, yep, but in my view, I'm not just debating semantics.

⬐ heavyset_go

Your layman definitions of monopoly do not matter when it comes to antitrust laws[3]:

> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power.

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...

⬐ a1369209993

> none of the three things you mentioned are anywhere close to monopolies.

Yes they are. Imagine that I imported alligators to Washington[0] and set up a gumbo resturant in Seattle. I would have a (local) monopoly on alligator meat. The fact that you can easily buy beef or chicken from any number of other places doesn't change this, it just means that my monopoly isn't particularly relevant.

Similarly, Facebook has a monopoly on communication with people and groups that communicate exclusively via Facebook. You could go communicate with someone else, just like you could go buy some other kind of meat in the above example, but there is no competitor for communicating with the people you actually (for some reason) want to communicate with.

The relevant question is whether Facebook's monopoly is broad enough to be relevant. Reasonable people might disagree about that. But there is no question that they have a monopoly.

> their monopoly was so powerful because there was often no other way to get from point A to point B

In such a case, the fact that you could instead choose to go to point C by way of some other railroad, does not mean they don't have a monopoly on travel to point B. (Nor does your theoretical ability to walk to point B, or track down a Facebook user in real life and visit their house.)

0: I'm going to assume noone has already done this.

⬐ huitzitziltzin

No, Facebook is not a monopoly. Your gumbo restaurant example gets at part of the issue: you need to describe the market correctly at a bare minimum.

Who are the competitors in the market OR, if there are none, why is the market definition you have offered the correct one?

This is why the FTC lost their monopolization case against Facebook this January. Instead of offering a market definition, they made vague, hand-waving statements in their complaint which all revolved around it being "obvious" that FB was a monopoly. The judge was not persuaded.

~Antitrust economist.

⬐ stale2002

> you need to describe the market correctly at a bare minimum

The Monopoly is on social networks with the exact same features as Facebook, in literally every way, down to the last detail.

Yes, that is a monopoly.

The question that actually matters though, is how much substitute goods there are for Facebook.

But yes, Facebook absolutely has a Monopoly on the product that is exactly the same as Facebook.

⬐ opensoc108

At minimum big tech (GAFAM) is guilty of Data Trafficking, Illegal Wiretapping and Racketeering.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/amazon-copied-produ...

Every interaction with them is blindfolded deep cavity strip search with average 30 agents(30 cookies) without our permission. Even the EU data compliance pop ups don’t show participants of this heinous data molestation.

Forget antitrust, they ought to be tried under racketeering laws or RICCO statues which was used against mafia. Bork and Lina khan doctrine while relevant can’t help us restore the old internet from the current toxic ad littered pages.

⬐ xg15

> There are lots of social networks (Twitter and TikTok are extremely successful, among others), lots of ways to search the internet, and lots of ways to shop online.

Those choices exist (in theory) for consumers, they don't exist for anyone who wants to be heard on the internet.

Ask a few owners of small websites how many of those are relevant to the death or survival of their site and you'll see why this stuff are de-facto a monopolies.

Also, as some other posters already said, it's not simply about the number of choices, it's how practical those choices are and how much market share they habe.

There are also lot's of parties competing in the US federal election - still, only two of them have any realistic chance to provide the president.

⬐ ZeroGravitas

The railroads weren't total monopolies, they were just local monopolies. If you didn't like them you could just move somewhere else, to another place with a local monopoly. Which is not the same as competition.

⬐ NoGravitas

Sounds like the current situation with broadband ISPs.

⬐ bmitc

I made a comment recently addressing these very things.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28851867

My contention summarized is that using market share as it has historically been used is not good, because these software-based companies can scale to much greater power than ever before whereas in the past, one had to gain significant market share to wield the same or even less power.

⬐ dahfizz

I think you and OP agree. Tech giants are clearly "too powerful" and need to be dealt with, but the traditional formulation of monopoly power is not a good way to deal with these tech giants.

⬐ sanderjd

Yep! We do agree. I wouldn't have commented if people were saying "these companies have too much power" because I agree. But they aren't monopolies.

⬐ bsder

> none of the three things you mentioned are anywhere close to monopolies

Let me propose a different way to think about it.

Can I do task <X> and prevent company <Y> from capturing any value from it?

Can I post my own video online and prevent YouTube from capturing any value? The answer is "No." Some jerk will post it to YouTube and a whole bunch of views will go over there and Google will capture ad revenue on it.

That's definitely a monopoly.

⬐ sanderjd

This thought experiment has nothing to do with what a monopoly is.

See, I think people have been using this term without any actual definition of it for so long that people are actively confused by what is and isn't a monopoly. People have said focusing on this word is "just semantics" but it isn't because people really aren't sure what it means.

⬐ supercanuck

They most certainly are monopolies and we can see it in their behavior.

What America is figuring out that, if the US Markets are going to remain uncompetitive, than Chinese companies that don't play by the same rules are going to outcompete these lethargic companies that don't want to get better but instead vacuum up all their competitors. This hurts American's technology advantage and competitiveness in the global marketplace.

>Again, according to the complaint, Facebook chose to buy an emerging threat rather than compete, and announced an agreement in February 2014 to acquire WhatsApp for $19 billion.

>The complaint also alleges that Facebook, over many years, has imposed anticompetitive conditions on third-party software developers’ access to valuable interconnections to its platform, such as the application programming interfaces (“APIs”) that allow the developers’ apps to interface with Facebook. In particular, Facebook allegedly has made key APIs available to third-party applications only on the condition that they refrain from developing competing functionalities, and from connecting with or promoting other social networking services.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2020/12/ftc-s...

⬐ sanderjd

> They most certainly are monopolies and we can see it in their behavior.

This is not true for all the reasons I already pointed out in my comment.

You can't just wish this away. You need some other theory of the case. I agree with you that all those things are bad, but those bad things just don't flow from monopoly, they flow from some other problem.

⬐ supercanuck

Take it up with the FTC and Tim Wu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Wu) then, you obviously are more in the know than they are.

⬐ sanderjd

The FTC is free to make the arguments you and others are making here. I would bet you large sums of money that those arguments will not prevail. In fact I'm quite sure they won't bring cases using those arguments because they know that and don't want to be embarrassed. They will probably bring different arguments and also lobby for other regulatory changes, and I'm all for all of that, but they won't come to court saying "Amazon has a monopoly on e-commerce", because lawyers don't like it when judges laugh at them.

⬐ rapind

> none of the three things you mentioned are anywhere close to monopolies

Imagine thinking that google doesn’t have a monopoly on search. That Amazon doesn’t have a monopoly on selling goods online, etc.

Now these companies do lots of other things that they don’t monopolize, but they ARE monopolies in specific high value spaces and they leverage those monopolies in their other endeavours.

⬐ sanderjd

Imagine thinking true things! Oh the horror!

⬐ noslenwerdna

Facebook does not have a monopoly on social networking

⬐ rapind

I didn’t mention Facebook. I can’t really put my finger on it. They definitely have a lion’s share of a certain type of social networking, but I’m not sure it constitutes a monopoly. Maybe social graph as GP states, but I honestly don’t know enough about it to chime in with an opinion about that.

⬐ stevetodd

Remember that you are the product and not the customer for these companies.

Google’s customers are the advertisers who pay and (I’d argue) those who want to show up in search results. You have to either pay for ads or play their algorithm game to be relevant because of their monopoly position on search. It’s basically the same story for Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc.

⬐ sanderjd

But this argument still seems to rely on "monopoly position on search", when there are in fact a number of search engines.

⬐ missedthecue

And additionally, the switching cost for users to change search engines is literally zero. It takes all of 2 seconds and opening a new tab.

There are no contract cancellations or negotiating or payment loss. It costs zero dollars and zero time. Google owns a huge portion of search simply because they have the best product.

⬐ huitzitziltzin

Your analysis is correct, but the quality of antitrust commentary on this site is not that high! Neither Google nor Facebook is plausibly a monopoly.

This does not mean that they don't occasionally do things which violate antitrust laws! They do. And they should be punished for such violations. But they aren't monopolies.

~Antitrust economist.

⬐ sanderjd

Exactly my take.

⬐ politician

When a system has two billion users, then it is the world's largest government. It really doesn't matter if it meets one nation's definition of monopoly.

Facebook literally rivals the Catholic Church for participation. Zuck is literally the Pope of his own empire.

⬐ alisonkisk

Well, not literally, but spiritually.

⬐ munificent

I think we need to be clearer by what "product" means when it comes to monopolies in the Information Age.

In the Industrial Age, you had a monopoly on paperclips if the only way to buy a paperclips was through your company. But paperclips themselves are commodity-like: there are billions of them out there and each is more or less interchangeable with the others.

Information products are not like paperclips. Each piece of information is by definition unique, and its value to the consumer is predicated on that uniqueness. When you buy a picture frame from a store, the first thing you do is throw out the little paper photo that's in it and replace it with yours. Why? The previous image was a picture of a smiling family. Isn't your goal with the product to have a framed photo of a smiling family? Why not just save yourself the trouble and keep the paper?

Well, it turns out that the fact that you want a smiling photo of your family is highly salient.

Sure, there are lots of social networks. If I want to find an app that has humans on it that I can connect with, there is definitely no monopoly. But if I want to find an app that lets me connect with my actual friends, then my choices are limited to exactly the social networks they actually use. If I want an app that doesn't just let me receive event invitations, but let's me receive the actual invitations my real friends send, I sure as hell better be on that one particular app. That app has an iron-clad complete monopoly on those events.

Almost every media or information company has thousands of micro-monopolies on various unique pieces of data. Our simple notion of trusts does not accommodate that concept. We need to update our thinking to the 21st century.

⬐ skybrian

Many of us have accounts on multiple social networks, and we are often connected to the same friends in multiple places.

I think that may be part of the problem, though. We don’t replicate our contact lists very often, and in part that’s because we use each social network for different purposes and would prefer to have different connections on each one.

For relatives and close friends, you probably have multiple ways to contact them including older technologies like email and phone. For other people you might not bother to keep contacts up to date.

⬐ bcrosby95

I find this argument pretty interesting. It seems like if social networks decide to adapt open protocols, it would pretty much kill it. Which wouldn't be the worst outcome out there.

⬐ munificent

> It seems like if social networks decide to adapt open protocols, it would pretty much kill it.

...which is exactly why they never will. This is how you know they are behaving monopolistically.

An analogous problem exists with media companies. Why do we all now have subscriptions to Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, etc. instead of just one? They don't seem to have a monopoly since there are so many. But we don't seem to have much choice either, since we end up having most of them.

The problem is that each has a complete monopoly on certain shows. If you want to watch "Stranger Things", the only way to get it is Netflix.

⬐ eyelidlessness

This is a weird analogy, specifically because copyright is designed and intended as a sanctioned, albeit time limited monopoly. Of course you can only get Stranger Things from Netflix. The only difference from cable is the studio has a distribution channel to your home. But it’s not like this didn’t exist before in eg Columbia House.

⬐ curryst

> Information products are not like paperclips. Each piece of information is by definition unique, and its value to the consumer is predicated on that uniqueness.

A piece of information is not unique. You and I can both know that 2+2=4. We probably both know what the president looks like.

That's the complication.

There's nothing preventing you and your family from being part of multiple social networks. There's nothing stopping a site from being listed in both Google and Bing. None of that information is necessarily unique.

Here's the real rub. Whether or not your friends are on multiple social media networks isn't controlled by Facebook; it's controlled by your friends.

I think it's going to be really hard to argue that Facebook has a monopoly because people use them and refuse to create accounts elsewhere. Facebook isn't taking away your choice to connect with your friends, your friends are. The accounts are free, and Facebook isn't going to ban you for having a Mastodon account.

I still think we need a more open environment. I just think we need a new concept for what's happening instead of trying to logically torture the situation to fit a heavily abstracted notion of a monopoly. And then we need to ban that concept.