TikTok is a curious one. The Chinese service appears to be a completely separate content silo. And Musical.ly grew in the US without needing antitrust action against FB or Snap or anyone else, in the same way that those companies displaced others. The bar to entry to that marketplace is already low, I don't think it's really relevant to discussions around Amazon or Google or MS or even Apple.

Great points. Social media is a different beast compared to Amazon/MS/Apple but seeing a CN company crack the US advertising duopoly (F/G) is interesting. And I do wonder how much of that pertains to the Musical.ly acquisition. Now, I'm trying to think about the discussion as it pertains to the AAM slice of GAFAM and the conversation gets more interesting for me there.

I can think of substitutes for Apple (Huawei) and Amazon (Alibaba) with US market penetration, but I can't think of any for M. I can think of a couple reasons why off the top of my head but I'm curious as to what you think.

Are you referring to TikTok as the crown jewel? I don't see how that description fits. Regardless:

* Where's the monopoly? TikTok is one slice of the social media pie, unlike Facebook's ownership of Whatsapp/Messenger, Facebook.com, Instagram (with its Snapchat lite features).

* What are ByteDance doing with TikTok that's different from what US companies do with their social network data? e.g., Twitter. As a side-note one could argue Twitter aqui-killed Vine, setting the stage for TikTok.

* If desired, couldn't the Biden administration immediately return to the Trump-era policy of requiring ByteDance to sell a substantial part of their TikTok business to a US company? Which is a remedy that US companies complain about when China does it.

I see far fewer problems with TikTok's associations with China than I do with Facebook's ownership of many slices of the social media pie, never mind that the US has many 3-letter agencies hoovering up data from US owned social media networks, even about US citizens (at the very least all it takes is an interaction with a non-US account for the US account data to be considered fair game).