News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Why Facebook Keeps Beating Every Rival: It’s the Network by azernik on Thursday April 20, 2017 @04:04PM (#14160324)
Well yeah. This is the "natural" monopoly that Friedman referred to (and dismissed). From the Mother of All Wikis:

"Natural monopolies arise where the largest supplier in an industry, often the first supplier in a market, has an overwhelming cost advantage over other actual or potential competitors; this tends to be the case in industries where fixed costs predominate, creating economies of scale that are large in relation to the size of the market, as is the case in water and electricity services. The fixed cost of constructing a competing transmission network is so high, and the marginal cost of transmission for the incumbent so low, that it effectively bars potential competitors from the monopolist's market, acting as an early insurmountable barrier to entry into the market place."

There's a good argument to be made here they all software sub-markets are natural monopolies.

There are no comments on this comment yet.