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Comment by twobitshifter | Hacker News Reader

Hypothetically, Facebook has a monopoly in social networking, but then they decide to launch a roblox clone tomorrow. Since they have a new product line where they don’t have a monopoly, we should look the other way? It’s true that Facebook exists in many spaces where they are not dominant but that does not diminish their dominance - in fact it’s their platform dominance that makes them so dangerous to smaller companies in other spaces.

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I honestly think that the idea that social networking is monopolizable is absurd.

There are billions of online person to person interactions that happen outside of Facebook. There are hundreds of thousands of websites and communities that allow communication, discussion and sharing of user generated content. There are hundreds of thousands of online spaces that provide an outlet to augment a message.

So if anything, regulators should start by redefining what's a monopoly because the current definition clearly doesn't fit the classic narrative around monopolies.

You’re commenting on a thread about reality, not a hypothetical, where the judge specifically called out reasoning such as yours that argues Facebook is a monopolist without defining terms or making concrete market share arguments.

> but that does not diminish their dominance - in fact it’s their platform dominance that makes them so dangerous to smaller companies in other spaces.

You have to demonstrate somehow that the dominance exists in a rigorous way.

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