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Comment by yalogin | Hacker News Reader

I don’t agree at all. These companies are all super important and provide valuable services. If they vanish suddenly tomorrow that hole will be felt by every single human one way or the other. You are going back to 1970s for your comparison but that is not where we are

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I'll grant you that for the AAG part of FAANG, but I can't think of a single useful product from FB. If FB itself vanished overnight people would just go back to sharing their cat pictures with family over sms (as they are doing anyway), and all the dusty unused Occulus headsets in drawers would stop receiving updates. Otherwise....

I don’t agree. As much as I don’t like FB, I have to admit that they provided a lot of value. People found joy in their products. Facebook before it became this cesspool attracted tons of people. WhatsApp is still hugely popular and useful. Instagram made countless people lots of money and create new means of livelihood.

Many small businesses use their FB page exclusively because they aren't big enough to bother with a real website. There will be a lot of pain for many small employers and their employees if FB software were to go away.

I can't think of a single useful product from Amazon, Apple and currently Netflix. But I use stuff by Google and Meta daily.

If your bar for "important company" is "no competitive alternative or reasonable substitute exists for this one companies product", I'd struggle to think of a single "important company" in the entire world.

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