In the Industrial Age, you had a monopoly on paperclips if the only way to buy a paperclips was through your company. But paperclips themselves are commodity-like: there are billions of them out there and each is more or less interchangeable with the others.

Information products are not like paperclips. Each piece of information is by definition unique, and its value to the consumer is predicated on that uniqueness. When you buy a picture frame from a store, the first thing you do is throw out the little paper photo that's in it and replace it with yours. Why? The previous image was a picture of a smiling family. Isn't your goal with the product to have a framed photo of a smiling family? Why not just save yourself the trouble and keep the paper?

Well, it turns out that the fact that you want a smiling photo of your family is highly salient.

Sure, there are lots of social networks. If I want to find an app that has humans on it that I can connect with, there is definitely no monopoly. But if I want to find an app that lets me connect with my actual friends, then my choices are limited to exactly the social networks they actually use. If I want an app that doesn't just let me receive event invitations, but let's me receive the actual invitations my real friends send, I sure as hell better be on that one particular app. That app has an iron-clad complete monopoly on those events.

Almost every media or information company has thousands of micro-monopolies on various unique pieces of data. Our simple notion of trusts does not accommodate that concept. We need to update our thinking to the 21st century.

A piece of information is not unique. You and I can both know that 2+2=4. We probably both know what the president looks like.

That's the complication.

There's nothing preventing you and your family from being part of multiple social networks. There's nothing stopping a site from being listed in both Google and Bing. None of that information is necessarily unique.

Here's the real rub. Whether or not your friends are on multiple social media networks isn't controlled by Facebook; it's controlled by your friends.

I think it's going to be really hard to argue that Facebook has a monopoly because people use them and refuse to create accounts elsewhere. Facebook isn't taking away your choice to connect with your friends, your friends are. The accounts are free, and Facebook isn't going to ban you for having a Mastodon account.

I still think we need a more open environment. I just think we need a new concept for what's happening instead of trying to logically torture the situation to fit a heavily abstracted notion of a monopoly. And then we need to ban that concept.

I think that may be part of the problem, though. We don’t replicate our contact lists very often, and in part that’s because we use each social network for different purposes and would prefer to have different connections on each one.

For relatives and close friends, you probably have multiple ways to contact them including older technologies like email and phone. For other people you might not bother to keep contacts up to date.

...which is exactly why they never will. This is how you know they are behaving monopolistically.

An analogous problem exists with media companies. Why do we all now have subscriptions to Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, etc. instead of just one? They don't seem to have a monopoly since there are so many. But we don't seem to have much choice either, since we end up having most of them.

The problem is that each has a complete monopoly on certain shows. If you want to watch "Stranger Things", the only way to get it is Netflix.

So, my question to you, if every non-Google search engine published their formula for rankings, and SEO for going up all their rankings was mutually exclusive with going up in Google's rankings, do you believe any site would implement them?

I doubt anyone would trade higher status on every other engine for lower status on Google. And in that case, they may as well be a monopoly.

This is exactly what antitrust law should not punish. Google has a large market share of search because it offers a good product. Antitrust law should preserve competition without punishing success.

People are free to use alternatives, including Bing. If they don't, that doesn't make Google a monopoly (which indeed in search they are not). It makes Google successful! (Though it is a successful firm which does occasionally violate antitrust laws in other areas and should be punished for that.)

No. Google has a large market share of search because it got in early, presented some synergistic products, heavily biased search results towards its own products to reinforce that, heavily gamed advertising bidding in its favor, placed anti-competitive requirements on hardware manufacturers of Android devices, and locked-in consumers' data so that competitors couldn't access it until it was forced by governments to allow consumers to download a copy.

Google, and Alphabet, do not today offer good products. I can go on for hours describing many years-long problems with the product offerings; culminating in my complete non-use of Google as a search engine because its results are so poor, stopped using Google News because of its tracking and curation biases, stopped using Google Mail because of its inability to provide filters that automatically mark emails as spam, stopped using Google Drive because it actively prevents many features from working in Firefox, and ... well the list can go on but I have better things to do.

"got in early" compared to what?

There were dozens of search engines before Google.

It's not that Google should be punished. It's that they should be stopped from using one product line to prop up another.

I don't know exactly how we contend with this definitional problem, but intuitively I think it should have something to do with prices and behavior. For example, if we were a fly on the wall in a Google exec meeting, we might be curious about whether they're jacking up the price of ads because they know no one can compete with them, or whether they're sensitive to charging more than their smaller competitors do. If they're behaving like their competitors are a serious threat, then intuitively they're probably not a monopoly, and it probably doesn't make sense to trust-bust them.

But anyway I'm not a lawyer, and I don't know what the current thinking is about any of this stuff.

There's an important difference between "capturing market share" and "capturing too much the market share." If Ford's going to put its competitors out of business, turn them into niche players, or even just get into a position where it can rest on its laurels for a few decades, our primary concern is no longer making sure Ford can be rewarded. Honestly, I don't see the downside of regularly breaking up a #1 player with too much market share into successors that are the #2 and #3 payers (and forcing major shareholders to divest one or the other). I want companies to be competing to get to the top, but once they get there, give them a prize for their effort and send them back down.

From my experience as a customer, Amazon's e-commerce operation hasn't improved much (e.g. their search is still as shitty as ever) and has arguably regressed in many ways (e.g. more shady products and fake reviews) in the last decade. That's pretty strong signal to me that they're not under enough competitive pressure.

For an idea of what it could be, try the search on electronic component distributor sites like Digikey[1] and Newark[2]. They are both improving their search in order to attract more customers benefiting all customers in the process.

Try to find a 34 inch 1080p monitor with both VGA and DisplayPort inputs on Amazon and you'll find yourself reading hundreds of monitor product pages. If Amazon had serious competition you could probably find and buy one in 5 or 6 clicks, or easily determine that such a combination of features doesn't exist.

[1] https://www.digikey.com/ [2] https://www.newark.com/

To hazard a guess, I’d speculate that apparent poor quality of search results is more likely Amazon trying to push customers toward items where Amazon earns more margin. The average customer probably just buys the first/cheapest result and isn’t going to spend hours scouring the product pages. There’s a lot of complexity in Amazon’s relationships with suppliers, fee structure, and warehouses/logistics that could affect the revenue-optimizing search ranking but isn’t obvious to the user.

You don't window-shop Digi-key. You're pretty much buying on spec sheets alone. I want to see all 330 ohm 1/4 watt through-hole resistors, now sort by price and availability in the quantity I need, then maybe discard products that don't meet some other criteria that I can't directly filter for. There's very little chance of making a sale through a slicker marketing campaign.

Conversely, people buying a single monitor might be browsing, potentially swayed by the right language and graphics on the landing pages. I'm pretty sure those bloody finches sold more ViewSonic monitors than any other aspect of their product line. For a window-shopping customer, getting the customer to see as many of them as possible improves their chances of a sale.

On the other hand, I will concur that Amazon's search is a disaster for computer products. I suspect it's also terrible in other verticals that have clear, well-defined "faceted search" concepts, but we probably have the most experience with that one here. I suspect it may be a casualty of their broadness of categories-- why spend the labour to provide really killer search if it hasn't proven to be an impediment to sales yet?

No. Not in the economics of antitrust. There is no "too much market share" threshold. Unless consumer welfare is harmed there is no reason to complain that a firm is "too big."

> From my experience as a customer, Amazon's e-commerce operation hasn't improved much (e.g. their search is still as shitty as ever) and has arguably regressed in many ways (e.g. more shady products and fake reviews) in the last decade. That's pretty strong signal to me that they're not under enough competitive pressure.

So go elsewhere! That's how competition should work. Among your other alternatives are Walmart and Target, which have quite robust online operations.

Amazon is not plausibly a monopoly.

https://promarket.org/2019/09/05/how-robert-bork-fathered-th...

And that original interpretation was what worked on the original monopolies (oil etc). The sooner we get back to that, the better.

Consumers are harmed by a "too big" firm that's under little to no pressure to improve its products. The retort to that usually "wait a few decades until the market sorts that out," but frankly, I could be dead by then.

Another poster addressed how the "consumer welfare" standard is not so much an economic argument, but rather a legal enforcement framework. I see little mechanism for consumer welfare to be harmed by the creation of multiple successor companies that all share the same successful formula of the "too big" firm but now have to compete with one another.

Antitrust law isn't about stopping people from accumulating a dominant position. It's about stopping people from using that dominant position to maintain itself or to spread to other areas. Ford produces the "Amazing Car" that everyone wants, costs $1, etc. great! When Ford uses an RFID reader to force it to only fill up at Ford Gas Stations antitrust steps in. The issue isn't that Google is the dominant search engine, but that it uses that to become dominant in ads. It's not that YouTube is dominant in video, but that uses that to encourage people to download Chrome.

https://www.justice.gov/atr/competition-and-monopoly-single-...

~Antitrust Economist.

"her paper highlights how the consumer welfare view of antitrust fails to curb the predatory pricing".

I said it elsewhere, but I not against the idea of trust-busting, but the industry analogies typically brought up don't really fit. The closest I can find in general discussion is that the services are a public good, but we tolerate/promote monopolies in those sectors (like utilities).

A better framing would be to focus on specific problems: "Facebook owning both facebook.com and Instagram and both Messenger and WhatsApp give them too much market power in social sharing and messaging, so Instagram and WhatsApp should be spun back out", "Amazon should not be able to use sales metrics of other platform sellers to inform their own product development", etc. Identify market issues, figure out regulatory language that speaks to those issues.

But "big companies are monopolies that must be broken up" is unhelpfully reductive.

It's my understanding the whole intent of anti-trust is consumer welfare. The connection between Amazon and pricing/competition seems to be a straight-forward connection between hurting consumer welfare and its market power in terms of Amazon's market power. But where does the connection come in between consumer welfare and the social media apps? I.e., how does FB hurt me by having the most/best information regarding my social network?

Or is your stance it shouldn't be framed in terms of consumer welfare at all?

Basically I just don't see anti trust regulation as being the best way to target the diverse set of issues society sees with the big tech companies of the moment.

It seems like society needs a term for the concept of a company accumulating far too much power, and that we need laws similar to anti-trust laws, that apply to these companies. This is an incredibly difficult problem to address specifically because FB is not a classic monopoly. I'm not even sure what it would mean to "break them up".

Amazon, MS, Apple, and Google are all far easier to split up. Each company has logical seams to split at (i.e., aws/retail, gcp/search/android, itunes/devices, etc). You could split FB and insta, but that doesn't really curb FB's power and influence at all.

Our forebears have us covered! Antitrust became the popular term, but back in the Gilded Age, it was often referred to as anti-consolidation. I think that is an excellent term for it.

AT&T was split on geographical lines, so maybe FB could be as well, and the regionals would all have to interoperate with open protocols that would allow for regional competitors.

Personally I would want to be able to host my own tiny Facebook instance that I control. Ideally I could even invite friends and family to share my ad-free self-hosted instance with a chronological newsfeed setup.

The right way to think about this is what kind of splitting would produce the most competitive landscape. We have a really successful example in the way that ISP competition has played out in various markets.

The US has regional ISP near monopolies in gigabit fiber, since the infrastructural outlay is so expensive. This is analogous to the moat FB has from building a vast and deeply connected network graph.

The ISP outcome has been that the US mostly pays extraordinarily high prices for substandard service.

Other countries have avoided this trap by regulating the enforced splitting of the network itself and the service provider. Since building out the physical network (the fiber, or the friend graph) is extremely hard, great that is a natural monopoly. Maybe you might get a couple of huge players, but the barrier to entry for new players is nearly insurmountable.

Each network graph / fiber provider is required by law to offer access to their network to third party service providers who you can contract with to provide you internet service over the network.

Japan for instance has this setup, with a handful of players that have built national (or regional) fiber networks, and when you buy service, you have a split bill. Part of it goes to pay for access to the physical network. The other part is to pay for an ISP that is routing your packets over the network.

I think this is the proper solution for FB. Break the company apart between the network graph provider, and the CLIENT layer. Let third parties provide their own friend graph client with features that people want.

Then you would see a flowering of competition as people feel free to try the client experience they prefer. * How about chronological news feed? * no ads, but paying your interconnect cost by making you pay a subscription * fine grained control of how many stories you ever see from specific over-talkative people. * delivering a subset of your friends' stories only on keyword-matched topics / hiding all stories that match specific topics.

I am not hopeful the technologically illiterate people writing the decisions will understand this though. Geographic splitting is nonsensical for a graph that is inherently global.

I can't tell if you have a reasonably thought out perspective based on your response or if it's just "corporations that are 'big' suck"

The reason there is no law against being “too powerful” is because it is a nebulous description that is not enforceable in a fair manner.

"Although the courts "have not yet identified a precise level at which monopoly power will be inferred"[1]

[1]Section of Antitrust Law, Am. Bar Ass'n, Market Power Handbook 19­20 (2005).

If a company is using its power to do something harmful, write laws against the harmful thing, irrespective of how much power the company has. Illegalizing shadow profiles of non-users would be a good step forward, illegalizing them only for FB-sized companies would be less good.

If a handful of companies are operating as a monopoly, that's already well-defined as an oligopoly.

I think the only other situation where a company can be too powerful is if they get too much power over the regulators. I expect it's rare to get there without becoming a monopoly or oligopoly, but it's probably not impossible.

I agree, hence my explanation of why there are no laws against "too powerful" companies. It is not an actionable condition.

This is an oligopoly. Because companies are arbitrary constructs, it's a defacto monopoly by multiple sellers. The terminology is useful, but not in the sense that it is then end-all of qualification.

Yes, oligopoly is a fine word to use, but you can't just wave your hands around to transmute that into monopoly.

Collusion often results in this, which is not a dejour monopoly, but a defacto monopoly. Collusion isn't even strictly necessary. Endstage capitalism naturally selects the winners who stay on top. It's a simple concept taught in beginning economics.

"big companies" == oligopoly == monopoly is exactly what people mean when talking about worrisome "big companies", without the commensurate analogies.

A monopoly is about perspective which is about scale not some subjective definition (like sanderjd endlessly trolls about). Legal systems all over the world combat real/threatened monopolies (eg the CCP recently acted unilaterally) in various forms. Whether you think it's a useful reasoning to group companies and use a specific term is irrelevant. I sincerely hope you can understand that.

Good luck with whatever.

When modelling monopolies economists posit one seller that can set the price because it's simple. Similarly, perfectly competitive markets have an infinite number of competeing firms.

In the real world, monopoly has never been as black and white as that e.g. if someone was granted a monopoly on selling salt, that didn't immediately strike anyone selling salt with a lightning bolt, it just meant you couldn't build an actual business on it since you could hit legal issues.

Similarly, people accused of being monopolies argue that the "market" is bigger (do planes and trains compete for long distance travel?) in a way that is fuzzy and human.

But the bigger issue is how do you tell the difference between someone who doesn't understand something, and someone who refuses to understand something? People pretended that climate change wasn't happening for 3 decades and counting to protect big corporations, so really there's no limit to what their influence can buy.

In many countries, we still tax it 65%, to ensure a one-time success doesn’t become a “monopoly” of some families over generations.

Likewise for companies. we can’t tax them per generation, but the monopoly laws are here to dismantle them if they keep hold on a market without ongoing “coup de maître” on innovation.

Amazon? eBay? WeChat?

Edit: It also doesn't speak to any of the issues with Amazon. (Also interestingly, Amazon's own advertising business is increasingly making this a tri-opoly.)

I'm in no way unique in this regard - for all of the talk of how much Amazon dominates e-commerce, the reality is that it's never been easier to successfully run your own e-commerce site (just look at Shopify's market cap).

Sure, if you're selling totally commoditized goods that's a different story, but even there you've got substantial enough web presences from retailers like Walmart and Target that Amazon still can't reasonably be called a monopoly.

I still believe the analogy holds, just substitute geographical points A and B with person A and person B (or business A to potential client B), and the similarities are obviously clear. There is often no other way to get from person A to person B than to use Facebook, or from person C to D without Twitter, ... . Yes, there are various social networks, but there was also various railway barons. Just like the railway was not a single nationwide monopoly, but instead a series of smaller regional monopolies, a single social network is not an all encompassing internet-wide monopoly, but instead a monopoly lording over a subgroup.

Is that really accurate, though?

How many people use a single social network? And regarding market power, very few companies do their online marketing on a single social network; they usually have a general strategy that they deploy on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.

The situation is even worse with messaging apps than with railroads, though, since there is a coordination problem between customers/users of each service, rather than each customer/user being able to make their choice of service in isolation. It's very hard for a messaging service to compete if it requires users to ruin the experience of not just themselves but also at least one of their friends.

It's really just so insane that the complaint being ascribed to monopoly power is that it's a tad inconvenient to use the many freely available competitive products. Yeah! That's what a market that isn't monopolized is like! There are lots of competing products, which is often less convenient than if everyone were using a single monopoly product!

Nope. Have you ever read the article "Facebook is censoring links to competitor social network Tsu and deleting old mentions"?[0]

> There are lots of competing products, which is often less convenient than if everyone were using a single monopoly product!

If I drive a Ford then it doesn't inconvenience me if someone else drives a Honda. This is equivalent to a market where messengers use an interoperable protocol, like email. The "less convenient" world you are describing is one where some roads can only be driven on by Ford cars, and others only by Hondas, causing people to choose their destinations based on which make of car they have.

[0] https://boingboing.net/2015/11/06/facebook-is-censoring-link...

I think it's very lame that Facebook would censor links to a competing site (if that is indeed what they're doing, which I'm happy to stipulate), but Facebook is not in any way the only way for people to see links to that site. Contemporary society provides that site a ridiculously giant number of ways to get the word out. There are lots of other sites where people can share the links, they can buy ads in articles, they can optimize to appear in search results, they can encourage people to share by word of mouth in messaging, email, and real life, they can buy billboards or ads in subway cars or lots of other things. I am not exaggerating when I say that it has never been easier to get the word out about something. That doesn't mean it's easy, it's just that it's always been hard and it's much easier now. This is why advertising has always been big business.

The Facebook of today didn't exist when Facebook was new. How did they ever get the word out and get engagement? They figured out other ways! Facebook is just not a necessary component of spreading the word about a new site. It's very useful, but also very possible to route around it.

The world also doesn't owe Facebook monopoly power over people's social graphs either, and yet Facebook is able to wield that to some extent. In case you think that this is something that Facebook achieved on its own merits, rather than being granted by society/government, it's worth considering the extent to which copyright and hacking laws are used to prevent interoperability.[0]

More generally, though, I believe that profit-seeking corporations should only exist to serve society, and therefore corporations do owe us minimally inconvenient products, however we decide to define "inconvenient" (and taking into account society's other goals, such as employment).

> it has never been easier to get the word out about something.

I think that is a reasonable assumption, but I think it's also true that it's never been easier to travel anywhere in the world, and yet local monopolies of railroads are still bad for society and should be regulated against.

[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interopera...

For example, my colleagues are on Twitter but not Mastodon. I can't leave Twitter without leaving my social network. Why does Twitter own access to my colleagues? Why should we allow that to be a competitive advantage? It's certainly at-odds with the principle of innovation--you're not on a platform because it's more innovative than another platform, you're on it because they have a monopoly on your social network.

Contrary to your claim, there's very little competition in these markets because corporate ownership of user social networks is an enormous moat. Not only can users not easily move to another platform, but advertisers can't easily spend their money on some new platform because the new platform is much smaller in all likelihood.

1. The primary product of an MMORPG isn’t access to a social network.

2. The social networks in these games is far smaller than social media platforms (we don’t usually worry about anti-trust for tiny markets)

3. As you mentioned, social media platforms are communications/infrastructure, not recreation.

Exactly. You can switch to another MMORPG and find another level 29 healer to restore your HP, but if your mother only uses Facebook, it's much harder to switch to a different social network and find another woman who gave birth to you.

Regardless of what program I use to communicate with my friends, that program is now a monopoly. Even if I coded up the website myself and my friends and I are the only ones to use it, that website now "owns access" to all my friends. It is absurd to label this website a monopoly.

This is also not actionable. Once my friends and I all decide on a communication platform, that platform is a monopoly and must be broken up (?), by removing some of my friends from the platform (?). In that way, it would literally be impossible for me to have a platform where I can communicate with all my friends, because such a platform would be a monopoly and must be broken up by your definition.

2. It's perfectly actionable: open protocols separate the platform and the network.

Yeah, the situation involves a contradictory litany of complaints. Google/Facebook/etc are terrible because they suppress free speech and terrible because they allow it. They're terrible because monopolize online advertising and terrible because they facilitate it.

The purpose of breaking up a monopoly is to allow competition to facilitate the provisioning of whatever good a monopoly provides. Lots of people imagine breaking up or regulating Facebook will prevent the variety of abuses that we see. But if you look at the "competitive Internet", you can observe a sea of garbage in the form of endless popups, malware and eCommerce fraud. Things seem little more thought-out than "I want this to stop", which is hardly a recipe for constructive change.

I think it depends on what you consider "the market" to be.

If I want to compare Amazon to the "Global Retail Market" (Amazon's preferred framing), then maybe they aren't in a monopolistic position.

But I—as ab individual—don't participate in the Global Retail Market. I participate in the "online US retail" and "Pacific Northwest retail" market. So I don't get much benefit out of there being more competition to Amazon in France, so the "Global Retail Market" doesn't seem like it's always the right framing. For me, it's still the case that Amazon doesn't feel like a monopoly, but I could imagine areas where Amazon is much closer to being one of just a small number of options for many products.

Similarly, I'm sure Facebook wants to be evaluated against _all_ communication media, but again I want to communicate with people in my immediate network. If 100% of my social network and business contacts used exclusively Facebook for communication, then from _my_ perspective Facebook might have a monopoly on my communication options (even if they have real competition in China from competitors).

I'm not so convinced that we should just accept the broadest possible interpretation of "the market" that we should evaluate as the correct framing. From the perspective of some individuals, if there is only a single dominant option, then that person still needs to deal with anti-trust issues.

It's similar to the way some of the major internet players will carve up the country into regions of fairly exclusive offerings. Across US broadband, the market may be divided amongst a number of different players such that it doesn't appear to be a monopoly. But when you zoom in to an individual municipality, it might be that there _is_ a monopoly at that level, and the competition that appears to exist in the "national market" is actual a union of separate monopolies (and other regions where there is actual competition).

So, while I totally agree with you that under the legal definitions of monopolies, many of these entities are not there, under individuals _practical_ definition of monopolies, many of these entities _are_ monopolistic.

It honestly doesn't. None of these are monopolies by any market definition.

Amazon has so many competitors: brick and mortar stores like Walmart and Target and Best Buy remain successful, online competitors again like Walmart and Target and Best Buy but also Ebay and in a different way Shopify and others, are also successful.

Your argument is slightly stronger in the case of Facebook, but still very weak. Facebook's social networks have strong direct competition in Twitter and TikTok. Facebook's communication platforms have strong competitors in iMessage, SMS apps, Signal, Telegram, Discord, etc.

I'm not 'accept[ing] the broadest possible interpretation of "the market"', I'm just not accepting hand-wavy non-definitions of "market" that only include a single company so that it can be called a monopoly by definition.

Again, I think there are major problems and I favor new regulations for all of those problems. But what I don't think makes sense at all is redefining "monopoly" in a way that makes no sense, just because anti-trust law is our only extant tool for solving the problems caused by enormous tech firms.

I'm with you here.

> Saying "monopoly" is just shorthand for market power, it's not a binary definition.

No, the word "monopoly" has an actual definition.

> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power.

[1] https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...

Edit to add: And to the "everyone knows what is meant". No, that's not true, lots of people have become confused by the usage of the word "monopoly" to describe the issues with big tech companies, through its pervasive usage in congressional hearings and media. Using confusing inaccurate language is not harmless, it confuses the debate.

Literally this is semantics. Literally, you are arguing about the definition of a word. So yes, by definition, you are quit literally arguing about what a word means, which is semantics.

That's what the word "semantics" means.

This is how the justice department defines them: https://www.justice.gov/atr/competition-and-monopoly-single-...

Yes.

> It's all about concentrated power.

No, absolutely not. There are many activities which violate antitrust law which have nothing to do with "concentrated power". Nor is "concentrated power" something which is banned in antitrust law (because it isn't clear what it is!).

~ Antitrust economist

Yes they are. Imagine that I imported alligators to Washington[0] and set up a gumbo resturant in Seattle. I would have a (local) monopoly on alligator meat. The fact that you can easily buy beef or chicken from any number of other places doesn't change this, it just means that my monopoly isn't particularly relevant.

Similarly, Facebook has a monopoly on communication with people and groups that communicate exclusively via Facebook. You could go communicate with someone else, just like you could go buy some other kind of meat in the above example, but there is no competitor for communicating with the people you actually (for some reason) want to communicate with.

The relevant question is whether Facebook's monopoly is broad enough to be relevant. Reasonable people might disagree about that. But there is no question that they have a monopoly.

> their monopoly was so powerful because there was often no other way to get from point A to point B

In such a case, the fact that you could instead choose to go to point C by way of some other railroad, does not mean they don't have a monopoly on travel to point B. (Nor does your theoretical ability to walk to point B, or track down a Facebook user in real life and visit their house.)

0: I'm going to assume noone has already done this.

Who are the competitors in the market OR, if there are none, why is the market definition you have offered the correct one?

This is why the FTC lost their monopolization case against Facebook this January. Instead of offering a market definition, they made vague, hand-waving statements in their complaint which all revolved around it being "obvious" that FB was a monopoly. The judge was not persuaded.

~Antitrust economist.

The Monopoly is on social networks with the exact same features as Facebook, in literally every way, down to the last detail.

Yes, that is a monopoly.

The question that actually matters though, is how much substitute goods there are for Facebook.

But yes, Facebook absolutely has a Monopoly on the product that is exactly the same as Facebook.

https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/amazon-copied-produ...

Every interaction with them is blindfolded deep cavity strip search with average 30 agents(30 cookies) without our permission. Even the EU data compliance pop ups don’t show participants of this heinous data molestation.

Forget antitrust, they ought to be tried under racketeering laws or RICCO statues which was used against mafia. Bork and Lina khan doctrine while relevant can’t help us restore the old internet from the current toxic ad littered pages.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28851867

My contention summarized is that using market share as it has historically been used is not good, because these software-based companies can scale to much greater power than ever before whereas in the past, one had to gain significant market share to wield the same or even less power.

Let me propose a different way to think about it.

Can I do task <X> and prevent company <Y> from capturing any value from it?

Can I post my own video online and prevent YouTube from capturing any value? The answer is "No." Some jerk will post it to YouTube and a whole bunch of views will go over there and Google will capture ad revenue on it.

That's definitely a monopoly.

See, I think people have been using this term without any actual definition of it for so long that people are actively confused by what is and isn't a monopoly. People have said focusing on this word is "just semantics" but it isn't because people really aren't sure what it means.

What America is figuring out that, if the US Markets are going to remain uncompetitive, than Chinese companies that don't play by the same rules are going to outcompete these lethargic companies that don't want to get better but instead vacuum up all their competitors. This hurts American's technology advantage and competitiveness in the global marketplace.

>Again, according to the complaint, Facebook chose to buy an emerging threat rather than compete, and announced an agreement in February 2014 to acquire WhatsApp for $19 billion.

>The complaint also alleges that Facebook, over many years, has imposed anticompetitive conditions on third-party software developers’ access to valuable interconnections to its platform, such as the application programming interfaces (“APIs”) that allow the developers’ apps to interface with Facebook. In particular, Facebook allegedly has made key APIs available to third-party applications only on the condition that they refrain from developing competing functionalities, and from connecting with or promoting other social networking services.

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2020/12/ftc-s...

This is not true for all the reasons I already pointed out in my comment.

You can't just wish this away. You need some other theory of the case. I agree with you that all those things are bad, but those bad things just don't flow from monopoly, they flow from some other problem.

Imagine thinking that google doesn’t have a monopoly on search. That Amazon doesn’t have a monopoly on selling goods online, etc.

Now these companies do lots of other things that they don’t monopolize, but they ARE monopolies in specific high value spaces and they leverage those monopolies in their other endeavours.

Google’s customers are the advertisers who pay and (I’d argue) those who want to show up in search results. You have to either pay for ads or play their algorithm game to be relevant because of their monopoly position on search. It’s basically the same story for Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc.

There are no contract cancellations or negotiating or payment loss. It costs zero dollars and zero time. Google owns a huge portion of search simply because they have the best product.

This does not mean that they don't occasionally do things which violate antitrust laws! They do. And they should be punished for such violations. But they aren't monopolies.

~Antitrust economist.

Facebook literally rivals the Catholic Church for participation. Zuck is literally the Pope of his own empire.