Is it possible they exist because the immense economies of scale and near zero marginal cost that software provides makes for a winner take all market?
As a customer, why would one use the 2nd best option, when the best option is available at no extra cost or very little cost?
Their ad system was pretty much ported from FB, one assumes, and their ads were sold by FB reps as part of a package.
I honestly don't know if they would have made it independently (and we'll never know, I guess).
The snapchat thing was different. Snap had a policy of focusing on iOS, while FB, IG and Whatsapp (all of which cloned their core feature) were available on Android. I personally think Snapchat shot themselves in the foot with bad product strategy.
And look at TikTok. They are definitely the biggest competitor FB have ever faced, so I'd imagine that the future competitive landscape for them looks much more difficult than the past.
Seems to have worked out poorly for them.
I'm not convinced by this assumption as i've seen contrary evidence. I've seen monopolies doing a great job, and i've seen competition destroy quality of service and price.
I would agree that the government needs to mitigate private actors. This regulation can take the form of splitting a monopoly but it can also take the form of keeping it a monopoly and regulating it by having a presence on the Board or through law.
The idea that we need multiple groups of people working on solving the same goal concurrently doesn't strike me of a one-size-fits-all approach. Multiple competing restaurants in a town is probably the way to go. Having virtual operators on the back of one physical infra as is the case with phone carriers for instance I would say is probably causing lots of overheads. I've seen it first hand from the inside. Turns out it's really complex to virtualize infra and have tenant-based billing. The only real difference is now you have 5 companies competing on marketing and offers on top of the same physical reality. Marketing costs can't vanish so the consumer is losing that money one way or another
A consumer shouldn't chhose the second if they don't want to. But governments should step in to ensure that the market remains competetive.
I think all monopolies are violence enforced or they are competitive otherwise somebody would step in and undercut their costs and the government has a monopoly on violence so...
It's reasonable to conclude that Facebook and Twitter have benefitted greatly by not having expenses to properly monitor their platform due to section 230 safe harbor exemption. They are able to get away with selective enforcement on their platform and not pay a monetary penalty for doing so.
To be clear this "legal authorization or protection" is not necessarily over regulation. Depending on the market, sometimes monopolies are the result of too much government regulation and sometimes they are the result of not enough government regulation. For example, most of the big tech monopolies do not exist because of regulatory capture. They exist because the government never put in enough effort to stop the monopolies from forming.