It's all of these, except private. It's a privately run notification/messaging/authentication/identity/verification service. Just one that is widely used. That doesn't make it "public".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
The barrier to creating a new social network once network effects have locked in a few major players is enormous.
In this situation, the market is more efficient when the large incumbents are granted a highly-regulated monopoly status.
That's how power companies work. You don't have new power grids cropping up, but the main providers are held to much stricter standards that a normal private company in terms of their quality of service and how much they can charge.
If we allow mass-scale social media to continue existing, we need these sorts of strict regulatory standards. These companies have become mad with power, and there's no way to unseat them through ordinary competition.
A natural monopoly is one that arises due to the high costs of entering the market and other barriers to entry that make it difficult for competitors to establish a footing.
Utilities are natural monopolies because it is very expensive to place pipes, transmission lines, etc., over large geographic areas. Consequently, a company must either have large starting capital or the ability to grab a large enough portion of the market to pay for the costs of the initial infrastructure outlay.
The barrier to entry for the short form messaging market? Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Any programmer can recreate the functional parts of Twitter in under a day, scaling aside. And there are already several Twitter competitors. They're simply not very popular because they're difficult to use.
I wholeheartedly disagree that the cost is "nothing, nada, zilch". The network effects of having everybody using a couple of sites is what makes the cost of switching high, not the technical triviality of creating a new website.
The cost of entering the mass-scale social media market is basically zero, since you can do that in a day with minimal cost other than a domain name and a server (or VPS or AWS/Azure account or similar), and you can scale your costs as you grow, but your costs don't grow as fast as your customer base.
A natural monopoly's costs start high, and just scales from there. It costs tens of millions for a utility just to enter a small market, and with utilities, growing may actually increase their costs (see, for example, power and water utilities).
>The barrier to creating a new social network once network effects have locked in a few major players is enormous.
So...that is what I said, that the barrier to entering the market is enormous.
I'm definitely dating myself here, but Livejournal, Blogger, Myspace, Frienster, DailyBooth, Friendfeed, Yikyak, Snap, Vine, were all once the dominant social media website before losing to new entrants.
Facebook was started in a college dorm room. Twitter launched as an employee's side project. Instagram began with two roommates sharing an apartment. WhatsApp began as one guy.
There’s no physical issue preventing competition like with power companies, but to a social media startup, getting enough users is a similarly hard challenge as constructing a new power grid.
And you’re not actually a social network until you reach some critical mass of users. The cost of entering the market is low as you point out, but that doesn’t imply that you can realistically compete. So I think it’s fair to call social networks a natural monopoly. Even if they don’t strictly fit the definition they’re still monopolies in practice.
The corporation providing the service doesn't matter, it's the how the service itself is used by the public. And social media is now at the same level as phones and internet.
Yep, and they can also terminate your service for any reason they choose.
22% of americans have had a twitter account: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2019/04/24/sizing-up-tw...
Social media is fundamentally different from ISPs and other utilities- there are some protections and restrictions under section 230 (for now) but number of customers does not a utility make.
Okay. That doesn't mean a whole lot at the moment.
The ISPs that allow you to even access Twitter at all are quite deliberately not regulated to this extent, so there's a lot of work to do before we can say that Twitter, of all things, is somehow a public utility without First Amendment rights.
Even if we agree that they are the right comparators, there's a problem for using that pair as a reference for how online service providers should be treated, since phone providers have a strong neutrality mandate and ISPs have none, so it basically provides no guidance whatsoever.
So if I am not allowed to access twitter, or banned from the platform then I am being banned from participating in my local government
So if it not a public service, then public organizations (like police, fire, schools, etc) should be barred from using the service