They can, but I'd argue that none of those had the pervasiveness of Facebook. Moreso due to timing & mobile adoption, than any actual failing.

Facebook's moat is that it's the Yellow Pages of social.

It took the web to kill Yellow Pages, not a better phone book. Which is probably why you see FB investing in acquiring social-but-different competitors and researching paradigm shifts.

I like that analogy but I'm realizing I have no real understanding of if people saw the yellow pages as a problematic monopoly in any way.

I'm sure no where near where facebook is with negative perception but it seems like small businesses at least could have viewed the yellow pages as problematic.

They saw it as problematic enough that AT&T was broken up in the 80s.

yellow pages did not have network effect.

None of those every turned into real businesses, whereas Facebook is one of the biggest money printers in the world.

Also, Facebook has been around for about 18 years now. Myspace was a major player for like 4 years.

Facebook grew in an environment where people were starting to get used to be spied and measured permanently, and it dialed it to eleven and greedily went for your parent's neighbor's cousin's kid's data too. All for ads.

Facebook makes more profit in 1 quarter than all of those combined had revenue over their entire lifetimes.

Stalin used to say that quantity has a quality all its own.

The world has changed. Even if Facebook decays, it could decay over literal decades, still being profitable. Yahoo is still around ($1.3bn in revenue), IBM is still around, SUSE is still around.

We only talk about the cool tip of the iceberg but IT/tech/software is huge.

but that was a long time ago, before any social network had the opportunity to establish the sort of dominance Facebook + Instagram + WhatsApp have

Instagram and WhatsApp were competitors in the making that FB bought out. They can't do that trick anymore.

why not. Facebook can afford it