It's interesting how they also collude with each other by defaming competitions and circularly maintaining this monopoly. Good example is Apple/Google process to accept new social media companies. It's nearly impossible and to a much higher standard they hold themselves.
I feel old writing this, but once a upon a time, phone-book companies (often the phone company, but not always) would deliver a phone book to every address with a phone. This was paid for almost-entirely by the advertising sold by the phone-book company.
If a company or person wasn't in the phone book, they pretty much didn't exist.
All of this has happened before, all of it will happen again.
Twitter should be a protocol with many providers and many clients, not a restrictive service from a single provider. Ditto most of the rest.
People want what was best for a small group of hunter-gatherers in hostile territory.
Market consolidation (regional, national, global) reduced the number of markets, reducing the number of players.
One very illiberal idea is that we also need to break up markets, erect some barriers. Prevent winners in one market from usurping other markets.
In markets concerned with serving European users, GDPR already allows you to download your data. Facebook has allowed one to download all of one’s own messages, pictures, etc. for many years now.
The problem is that, in order to avoid infringing on other people’s privacy rights, downloaded data has to be anonymized: you can see your own messages as your own, but anything from another user will just be identified with a random identifier instead of their real name. This then makes it a challenge, when you want to import the data into a new service, to have all those messages associated with your friends’ accounts on the new service.
Watch how fast Facebook would adapt and be monitoring news and trying to conform to the public opinion if they felt they needed to compete.
The only reason we're in this position is because a reduction in real competition in the market and the only power they fear is that of democratically elected representatives.
Elizabeth Warren had this right. Break up the platforms, and force social networks to allow a download of your data in a json format and move to a seperate service. Easily. That is the ONLY regulation we need.