If social networking were a natural monopoly, could a startup really stand a chance?

I feel the fast pace of innovation and customer behavior shifts makes these products very different from oil and railroads.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/5/3/15537000/whatsapp-stories-...

I prefer the more standard definition where a market that naturally tends to monopoly is one where a multi-company state is less efficient than a single company state.

In social networking, despite the power of network effects, having multiple companies is still efficient simply because people want to compartmentalize their networks of friends and interests. People want to use WhatsApp to talk to group A, and Skype to group B.

There's a tendency to assume that since phones were a monopoly, and mail is a monopoly, then all communication and social interaction aides must be naturally monopolies too, but that's not the case. Phones and mail were monopolies due to physical efficiency, not due to the desires of consumers.

>> natural monopoly for search

Google has most of the search users, creating better data for improving its product (ad targeting and search), so it gets all of the ad budget for search. Data+ad revenue suffocates the competition of users and revenue creating a natural monopoly.

A natural monopoly in an area arises from the dynamics of the business itself, other monopolies require external forces to prop them up.