The way I look at it, if not even Google can beat FB at personal social networking (Google+), then FB has a monopoly and this is not a free market. Sure, anyone is free to start a startup and try to do what FB does, but I mean...
I suspect the only reason the government hasn't gotten involved in this matter yet is because FB offers seemingly non-essential service. A different situation than Microsoft and browsers.
Unfortunately, they might not understand privacy concerns, but even if they did, they don’t have the language fluency or technical capacity to verify the claims of security.
Free Markets are.
Capitalism is about the means of production being held in private hands - but those private hands still do their best to own all of the means of production and to lock out potential competitors.
The two get conflated (free markets and capitalism) but they are different beasts. In fact, you can have a free market socialism (tried semi-successfully by Yugoslavia). But ensuring free markets via regulation is how to keep Capitalism from becoming a Gibson novel.
a) Also using competition, prices and money, but with factories, companies and lands organized by worker's cooperatives, with the profit shared according with some logic not based in mere property.
b) Using only prices and money while keeping updated data about production and consumption, and updating prices based in these data. Perhaps easier with modern technology than in the past. The information about these things can propagate in wires and communication means like the other kind of information that the society needs.
Item b) sounds like capitalism and blockchain to me :)
About item c), heuristics and politics don't go well together, according to my intuition.
But these are just my opinions. This is a fascinating topic.
Capitalism is not naturally stable and it needs regulation to work to the benefit of most people. Without that, the capitalists work to destroy capitalism in order to benefit themselves.