They don't have dibs on natural resources like oil or physical space like with railroads. In theory skillful people can create better analogues of Facebook and Instagram that would serve less ads, be more meaningfully engaging, collect less data etc.

That makes sense.

If you expand "natural" resource to include something pertinent to network effects (e.g. human attention is a resource) then I see that as the beginning of an argument in the opposite direction.

They don't have an ownership right on attention. Railway company might have some unique long term lease on the land. Each user can extract their data with takeout, delete account and if they must – use another service.

They have dibs on a natural resource called personal data.

Do they? I'd wager Google knows a great deal more about me than Facebook.

Maybe.

In that case I must be a very special case or they are absolutely clueless or something.

I see nothing but idiotic ideas coming out from Googles knowledge of my data:

- absurdly irrelevant and even insulting ads. I can easily count on one hand the useful ones I have got (one for a local shop and one for Jetbrains products I think).

- Google Now suggesting in the middle of the night that I should text the boss two levels above me or call a random girl I once helped with a computer(!)

Same. I think these AI companies make too many assumptions on what people want and need. It's like people are lab mice they watch in terms of some experiment, but don't communicate with beside asking to name interests like technology or cryptocurrency and rate the quality of the call.

I agree in some respects. It's hard to leave Google and Facebook because their accounts are used to login to other sites and services. Also when you buy apps and switch mobile OS you don't have a right for a free copy of this app from a different store, i.e. not real ownership because your app is tethered to the store.

Because it isn’t.

Anyone can open a social media site. Anyone can use it. Anyone can leave it.

Being where everyone wants to be isn’t a monopoly when innumerable other venues are no harder to visit.

If network effect means quality or “price” (in terms of what you trade, whether or not its money, for the experience) changes don’t lead to substitution between the dominant site and other sites, it absolutely is a monopoly, even if it would be equally easy to go to other sites. Monopoly is an empiricial, behavioral question of substitution between notional competitors, but not abstract question of available alternatives.

I'd say not monopoly, but anticompetitive behaviour like leveraging company's size, reach and cash to "forcefully" acquire competitors.