There seems to be a fine line between price-dumping that ends up hurting consumers once competitors are driven out of business, and aggressive competition that benefits consumers by driving down prices and increasing availability.
Let's take Stories. Facebook has monetized them, and pretty clearly realized they could monetize them when they rolled out. Does the fact that Snapchat came up with them mean Facebook should not be able to launch something that they plan to monetize? By this logic, anything Facebook rolls out that someone else did first wouldn't be allowed.
In either case, though, using market supremecy to crush competition should not be rewarded.
They weren’t small in terms of users. But they were small in that just a few years prior, their user amounts were a fraction of what they were during Google+‘s launch. With Friendster, Mysapce, and all the me too social networks losing, there was no way to know for sure Facebook would win out and last as a huge company in the early 00s.
In early 00s, their revenue and profits hadn’t caught up to user growth either. The mobile explosion hadn’t fully happened yet. As well as Instagram now being a key part of their growth and solid part of their revenue and profit.
Google had around 1,000 engineers dedicated to Google+, plus the entire company had KPIs based on the success of the project. Facebook had less than 1,000 engineers in total.
The system we live under is capitalism. It's aims are to provide profits to those who invest their existing wealth in innovations. If those with wealth can't use it to gain more wealth, they have no incentive to use it.
The government steps in when a given enterprise meets the definition of monopoly - IE, actually prevent new entries into a field (Microsoft met this definition). Google and Facebook are unpopular but I'd say it's pretty clear they don't meet the definition of monopolies preventing entry into their industry (at least on the net, Android is another matter).
"Scummy behavior" is dumping poison in rivers or working people 90 hours a week. Normal competition is large companies putting smaller companies out of business through greater leverage. I don't care about a random small company getting rewarded for its random innovations. Why should I? The smaller company would probably crush an even small company given the opportunity. Large companies can sometimes offer more health benefits and such and smaller companies work 90 hour weeks more often.
If you want a different social system or something, good for you. If we're talking the present system, weeping for the operations of the market is waste of time. Regulate actual bad behavior, sure. But otherwise, save all regulatory effort, I'd suggest.
> ...I don't care about a random small company getting rewarded for its random innovations. Why should I?
As a company grows, true innovation usually gets squelched in favor of derpy project management bullshit. Creative people get burned out and leave, or, in some cases become "a fellow". The main way these big companies can actually innovate is to buy these smaller companies. It might be good for the owners of the small company, some folks cash-out, some get new jobs, some aren't so lucky. Whatever happens a bunch of folks got some great experiences and the satisfaction of creating something new.
I don't see this stuff as a bad thing-- and especially not for social media stuff.
Yes, the market takes care of this so I don't have to care.
The role of the citizen is caring about situations where markets malfunction - true monopolies, externalities, and all that jazz.
This is the exact same playbook that Microsoft used to strangle many, many promising companies back in the '80s and '90s: Stac Electronics (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics), WordPerfect, Netscape, the list goes on and on. It's just impossible to successfully compete with someone who has an endless supply of money and can stand as a gatekeeper between you and your potential customers.