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Comment by avalys | Hacker News Reader

It's kind of hard to argue that Facebook has a monopoly on "social media" when there's so much actual competition for attention in the same space. Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, iMessage, Youtube, etc. Yeah, there is no other Facebook-style social network to share photos of your grandkids or whatever, but no one under the age of 30 even uses that these days and it's hard to argue that it's as deserving of government intervention as oil, railroads, or telecom in general were.

I'd be looking much more closely at Amazon (nearing a monopoly on e-commerce, soon to be all commerce) and Google (an actual monopoly on search) if I were the government...

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It is even harder to argue this when Facebook's customers are advertisers, not users (which are a resource). Facebook does not have a monopoly on advertising. But this is the best avenue to show it does consumer harm, which is the legal critera for a monopoly. Here, "consumer" would be advertiser. How Facebook treats advertisers is going to determine the legality of any monopoly claim, regardless of whether people intuitively believe Facebook is "too big". To make that be a criteria for breakup, one would need to change the law, not issue any directives from administrators.

We do not really have a law on services that treat users as a resource. There is a clear need of innovation here. GDPR is a tiny step in this direction.

GDPR is an absolute disaster which has already stifled innovation and entrenched incumbents

In my country at least: enforcement is de facto non-existent and, beyond the most basic formalities, barely anyone cares.

> law on services that treat users as a resource

Don't we call that labor law? I'm being somewhat facetious. It just struck me as humorous to think of it that way.

Interesting point. Facebook has 2.8B active monthly users. How many does the next highest one have? TikTok has 680M which is not even a quarter of that.

What do the numbers look like in the US though? I did some googling and found about 190M for Facebook, 80M for TikTok, and 70M for Twitter. I don't know how accurate the numbers are, because they were from pretty sketchy sources. But if the real numbers are anywhere close to that, then that does make it seem like Facebook has a fair few competitors.

Aggregate spent time is probably the most interesting metric.

Plus, if a service visibly dominates in some demographics (e.g. 35-50), is it a "local monopoly" in the same sense as if it dominated in a geographic region, say, the Midwest?

Because if all your friends and colleagues and schoolmates use service X, you are strongly incentivized not to go to another competing service where only much younger / much older people are.

Not many care about monopolies. We care and want fair competition. Each of the companies mentioned in your comment don't matter except where they are anticompetitive (FB is based on what Mark says alone and Amazon appears to be based on their Amazon basics and similar patterns, as I recall Apple has right to repair related issues tangent to this and Google and Apple colluded on fixing salaries, not sure about the details here...). None of this has to do with monopolies.

After the last election cycle in the US I’d be interested to know which platform was used to spread the most misinformation. That was very damaging.

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