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Comment by nugget | Hacker News Reader

>The only thing they really stand to lose by banning blatant conspiracy theory whack jobs and divisive hate speech is some ad revenue associated with that stuff

Facebook is at or near monopoly status and as such the largest risk to their business is regulation. That's why this is such a sensitive issue for them.

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No they aren't. Monopoly status for what? It's just a shitty website. Take a step back and think about what Facebook is. It's no different than the forums of old. It's the same recycled technology with a new interface.

For a while you might have said that they were approaching some kind of weird monopoly status because you had to use FB to login to third party sites/services, but that didn't last long.

There are developing countries where FB is so much a monopoly that huge percentages of people don't even know that anything else exists on the Internet. To them, FB is the Internet.

But anyway, that's an argument for encouraging competition and computer literacy, not for or against free speech.

It's actually reversed. People in developing countries are actually more savvy in many ways, as they entered into the Internet during an era where there was no Facebook or Facebook wasn't the dominate player. It's really only in the US where people are so illiterate that FB is a primary destination. But that doesn't make it a monopoly.

I'm sure different countries are different. Myanmar is the one I'm familiar with and FB is definitely a monopoly there.

This site gives FB 88.11% currently. Interesting that its trending down slightly:

http://gs.statcounter.com/social-media-stats/all/myanmar

Without anything [obvious] to indicate what is wrapped up in "Other," that would seem to be a ranking of US-based, primarily-English language sites.

What makes you think the social media landscape of almost any country in the world isn't dominated by US-based services? They only need to provide a localized version to get into a market, which they then end up dominating through international network effects.

The only country I'm aware of where domestic services are dominant is China, and the statcounter data does reflect that. They are conspicuously missing WeChat and QQ, though (which are messaging applications and probably hard to track for a third party), so maybe there's some local service in Myanmar that similarly falls through the cracks.

OK, so, a monopoly on social media. But so what? You don't HAVE to use social media. It's not like having a monopoly on energy, banking or telecommunications, for example, where you can really put people over a barrel.

You don't HAVE to use energy, banking or telecommunications either. It's not like having a monopoly on food or water. The line you drew here is completely arbitary.

Fake news.

Not from what I've read. There are literally places in the developing world where FB fake news has caused the death of people. This example was from Asia. I don't remember the country, but it was news a few months ago.

You're probably thinking of Myanmar https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43385677

WhatsApp lynchings in India?

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-44897714

You didn't answer the parent's question: monopoly on what?

> Facebook is at or near monopoly status

Monopoly status for what?

Ads? No.

Online ads? No.

Communication amongst friends? No.

Reading news? No.

They have a monopoly on what?

Misused image macros and pyramid schemes.

> pyramid schemes.

What? Did Herbalife and Amway went out of business and nobody told me so I could celebrate?

Pyramid scheme incubator

I think they have a monopoly on social media.

Except they don’t? Twitter is pretty big too. Facebook is just the biggest player.

And that's before you even get into the issue of defining the market (a necessary step for any analysis of monopoly power): what is social media?

Twitter is an order of magnitude smaller than FB

If they are an actual monopoly, their biggest risk is not being involved in writing those regulations. Eventually the public will force legislators to act and they're not know for taking measured responses once the public outrage reaches a certain threshold. That's why telecom companies like Comcast are so successful at forming local/regional monopolies - they have relationships with people from the city planners up to mayors and governors so whenever new regulations are written, they're very involved.

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