I think we need to be clearer by what "product" means when it comes to monopolies in the Information Age.
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.
> 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.
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.
Many of us have accounts on multiple social networks, and we are often connected to the same friends in multiple places.
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.
I find this argument pretty interesting. It seems like if social networks decide to adapt open protocols, it would pretty much kill it. Which wouldn't be the worst outcome out there.
> It seems like if social networks decide to adapt open protocols, it would pretty much kill it.
...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.
This is a weird analogy, specifically because copyright is designed and intended as a sanctioned, albeit time limited monopoly. Of course you can only get Stranger Things from Netflix. The only difference from cable is the studio has a distribution channel to your home. But it’s not like this didn’t exist before in eg Columbia House.
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.