Why Facebook Keeps Beating Every Rival: It’s the Network, of Course

This is a good start, but I think there could be a lot more thought given to how we should think about monopolies in the context of markets where networks effects are crucial to the business value (aka. Facebook and Google most obviously, arguably Amazon, Apple), because one logical conclusion is that in a market where network effects are a major factor, the biggest network should be best positioned to provide the most value and therefore (assuming it doesn't actively eff things up on other fronts) should continue to grow until it dominates the market...which seems to pretty much be what happened, and it makes pretty good sense for the most part. in these cases, it actually seems BAD to break these networks apart, since their scale is arguably one of its primary values to the customer - this doesn't mean of course that they can't abuse their monopoly powers (I think they probably do to some degree and will continue to), but interesting to think that the traditional "break up monopolies" impulse doesn't make as much sense. this leads me to think it will just be more consumer-protection-related regulation (under the banner of consumer privacy, or maybe even public health, given all the "social media addiction" thought pieces out there these days ha).

One thing I've found super interesting/impressive about Snap is that it didn't try to outcompete FB in terms of sheer network size for its usage stickiness, and instead turned smaller, tighter and more private networks into a differentiator, while at the same time providing advertisers/brands with a competitively massive audience - not an easy thing to identify, much less execute on. TBD if that differentiator is enough to keep them alive vs. FB's more traditional network-effect-driven advantage, which will be hard to beat on its own terms. I think Snap's success will depend a lot on its ability to avoid being tempted to play that game (see: Twitter!).

random other thought: this all also reminds me that Mark Zuckerberg has not made a peep about wanting FB to be thought of as a "utility" in a long time (or maybe he has and I just missed it...but couldn't find any recent mentions), probably in part because they are now a lot more at risk than ever before of being regulated like one (see this talk from 2013: https://techcrunch.com/2013/09/18/facebook-doesnt-want-to-be...). Also kind of funny to hear him talk about "we don't want FB to be cool" too, because now it seems like FB very much wants to be cool again now that Snap has become cool and has threatening user counts.