Economics: What a monopoly isn't.

[Speaker to Animals]

For example, the telephony monopoly enjoyed by Ma Bell back in the 20th century was the result of the network effect. The government argued and won the case against them and they were broken up. Yet Ma Bell argued exactly as you two did: anybody can just build their own competing phone network, with competing lines, etc. But because of the network effect, nobody really is going to do that. You'd have one set of Americans on one network not able to call Americans on the other network. Obviously that argument fails and Ma Bell got broken up.

However, you can't really break up a social network like that. The best solution, as far as I know, would be to simply require Facebook open their network. Create an API to access to run basic functions within the Facebook network. Then people can create competing networks that would be able to operate within Facebook somehow. I don't know how feasible that is, so I am not arguing we should actually do it. Just saying. There really are few options to get around the fact that all social networks are natural monopolies.

[heydaralon]

For example, the telephony monopoly enjoyed by Ma Bell back in the 20th century was the result of the network effect. The government argued and won the case against them and they were broken up. Yet Ma Bell argued exactly as you two did: anybody can just build their own competing phone network, with competing lines, etc. But because of the network effect, nobody really is going to do that. You'd have one set of Americans on one network not able to call Americans on the other network. Obviously that argument fails and Ma Bell got broken up.

However, you can't really break up a social network like that. The best solution, as far as I know, would be to simply require Facebook open their network. Create an API to access to run basic functions within the Facebook network. Then people can create competing networks that would be able to operate within Facebook somehow. I don't know how feasible that is, so I am not arguing we should actually do it. Just saying. There really are few options to get around the fact that all social networks are natural monopolies.

Alexander Graham Bell didn't have a monopoly on telephones. Some I-talian guy invented it first, so people could go to Italy if they needed to call someone.

[Kath]

20 social media sites with over 100,000,000 users.

https://buffer.com/library/social-media-sites


Which totally means there are no other options. Lol.

[Speaker to Animals]

1. There are many different kinds of social network sites. Comparing something like LinkedIn or YouTube to Facebook is like comparing auto manufacturers to bicycle manufacturers.

2. The number of people a company claims are users is irrelevant to market share. Look at the actual data and social media interactions that happen every day. There is nothing remotely close to Facebook. If something ever comes along, it will replace Facebook.

[Fife]

There is nothing remotely close to the yellow pages.

At least that's what every traveling salesman was telling me about my "social media" presence back about 1992.

[clubgop]

There is nothing remotely close to the yellow pages.

At least that's what every traveling salesman was telling me about my "social media" presence back about 1992.

No one got kicked out of the phone book cause they told a reporter to learn to code.

[nmoore63]

There was no social network monopoly when that happened.

The nature of what a social network actually is dictates that there is only going to be one social network in the end, which is a monopoly. The way around that is for social networks to be designed for interoperability. Good luck convincing Facebook to allow competition like that.

Unless you successfully get the government involved facebook monopoly is not a problem. The lack of infrastructure costs to create another network and the inability of facebook to prevent their network from being integrated into the internet as whole prevent facebook from being able to enforce monopoly conditions.

[SuburbanFarmer]

Weekend reading.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04- ... gain-or-it

[Fife]

Some commentary on the recent cell-phone Pajeet FCC fuckery fucking over the country.

How Anti-Trust Policy Hurts the Little Guy

The most recent example, the week of 22 July 2019, has passed without much notice or comment except from the watchers of financial markets. Two of the largest private mobile data provides in the US, T-Mobile and Sprint, have been in negotiations for several years to merge companies. This is a sensible business move from the point of view that Sprint has been struggling financially for years but is also the owner of an array of network towers and infrastructure in less-accessible parts of the country.

. . .


All of US antitrust law was set, as previously stated, mostly on Ida Tarbell’s expose from the early 20th century. However, that exposé was itself fallacious because she set out to prove that there was predatory pricing involved solely on the assumption it was impossible for Rockefeller to own as much of the US oil market as he did and not be presumed to be engaged in predatory pricing. Aside from being bigoted, her view was very myopic. She only looked at the US as a single entity and did not consider the global market in which he was in very direct competition with oil coming out of Eastern Europe and, later, the Middle East.

The modern relationship between law and business, dating back to either Ida Tarbell and her exposé on Standard Oil, is built on the fallacious idea that big must of necessity be bad for the little guy, and yet, as the history of Standard Oil shows, sometimes the little guy benefits more from big than he does from small. The example in the case of the data networks is also that such governmental interventions violate the consumer choice that they claim to protect. The subscribers to T-Mobile’s lower-cost plans received no choice in terms of their accounts being sold to a different company, one that is currently incapable of providing organically the types and quality of service as their previous servicer.