Monopoly on platform reach. The reach of facebook, or the reach of youtube, twitter etc, is so high, that if you want to disseminate a message, those _must_ be the platforms you use. It's as if they own the radio spectrum, and you have to acquiesce to what they demand to use said spectrum.
Of course, i am free to use smoke signals to send my message, but who will receive it?
Even though they are competing for attention, they each use different mediums. As an analogy, it's like only having one radio station, one TV station, and one magazine. There needs to be dozens of each for there to be a true marketplace of ideas.
Can you define a market each of them has a monopoly over? There are many popular video apps and many popular social media apps. Exactly what does each of them have a monopoly on? A network effect is not a monopoly. Being the exclusive provider of convenience for some specific group of people is not a monopoly.
For example, in some religious town, it's possible that the only way to reach a certain group of people on a Sunday afternoon is to go to the church. This does not mean the church has a monopoly on reach. Likewise, it's possible that where you live, the only place you can get a meal at 2AM is Aunt Ann's Diner. This doesn't make them a monopoly. Nor is the only sushi restaurant in town a monopoly. We live in a world of differentiation - every service provider that has a reason to exist provides something that others don't. This doesn't make everyone a monopoly.
Also, on none of these platforms is it trivial to build a large audience. And it's certainly possible to build a large audience through other means. For any given platform to have a monopoly on reach, people must be spending so little time outside of this platform that it's impossible to reach them otherwise. That's not a world any of us lives in. Even Youtube accounts for a very small fraction of time spent on watching videos and Facebook and Twitter are two of a large number of popular social networks. Snapchat, WeChat, iMessage, Weibo, TikTok, QQ, VK, Reddit, LinkedIn and Line to name a few.
Because more people choose to eat McDonalds burgers than the local dive bar burgers, does this mean McDonalds has a monopoly on burgers?
My local dive bar can serve me burgers whether it has a customer base of 1.000 or 1.000.000. A social network, however, cannot function without hundreds of millions of users. Otherwise it's an anti-social network.
As a result I can post my video to DailyMotion instead of YouTube but how am I going to build a following without engaging with Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter?
These networks require mass user engagement to be effective which precludes a myriad of competition. I don't think breaking these companies up as Elizabeth Warren suggested is the correct solution because it fundamentally handicaps their ability to function. But I think there does need to be regulation around how they do business which sadly does not exist.
I think the point is yes there are alternatives however given the size/reach of FB, YT, and twitter even those alternatives really aren't competing with them. They own the market share for what do and even many of those alternatives (ie mastodon) post on twitter or FB news or service updates. I'd say the alternatives don't even make up 5% use over FB, YT, or twitter.
Is it a monopoly in the normal sense of the word probably not, but the issue remains that alternatives are niche and truly don't directly compete. I think though as things like people being banned, creators being demonetized or the numerous other things that have happened in the last year to show users of these platforms the problems; we might see these alternatives pick up ground as these people with followings and clout get kicked off or decide to find alternatives. They get too big for their own good and in the process they will end up fragmenting their communities causing some to take alternatives serious.
What Facebook IS a monopoly of is getting your content to go viral. I argue this service is not speech. Which is why I oppose web hosts and cloudflare censoring content, but support social networks banning users. When web hosts do it, users who WANT that content can't get it anymore. When social networks ban people, they merely can't find new eyeballs that never specifically requested that content.
This isn't true though. Alex Jones can disseminate his message through countless other websites, which have their own users. This is really just advocating for equal exposure of opinions, which isn't a free speech issue.
i can post a comment on FB and get 0 likes, that doesn't give me equal exposure to the latest nike video on their page.
denying opportunity for exposure is giving that platform the ultimate authority on what shouldn't be able to be exposed in society, if society is reliant on that platform.
i don't want alex jones to have exposure, but i don't want an exec deciding what's next on the chopping block. a page suggesting publicly available employee salaries? they shouldn't have that power
If we're talking about internet providers, that's a different issue, since they are a user's conduit to the entire web. Those absolutely should not be able to choose which accounts to favor.