I find it very interesting that we went from people mostly being on Compulserve, to AOL, to Yahoo and the concept of integrated portals, to a bunch of small websites strewn around the internet, and then back to a few social networks. All that happened organically, with no antitrust scrutiny or regulatory changes (beyond the commercialization of the internet) that I know of.
Despite this, people are departing existing aggregators and social media for SIGs to get around the spam, the screeching, and general annoyance... so we're probably going to see a more balanced network over the next decade... because making money isn't everything.
AOL in the 1990s was the single largest consumer of CDROMs, which it mailed out by the billions. I recall walking into a US post office sometime in that period to find every level surface stacked a foot or more deep in the things.
<https://www.vox.com/2015/5/12/8594049/aol-free-trial-cds>
<https://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2014/08/she-gave-the-...>
MySpace was killed, though less by Facebook than Google, according to Tim Vanderhook, CEO of Viant, which bought MySpace in 2011:
<https://petapixel.com/2024/08/30/myspace-ceo-facebook-didnt-...>
Facebook itself has spent tens of billions of dollars buying up competition, most notoriously Whatsapp:
<https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/charliewarzel/why-faceb...>
Amazon crushed its own competition, including Diapers.com and Zappos, either driving them out of business or acquiring them, or both.
Diapers.com: <https://slate.com/technology/2013/10/amazon-book-how-jeff-be...>
Zappos: <https://www.fastcompany.com/1314670/amazon-buys-zappos-847-m...>
If your point is that antitrust regulators were asleep at the switch (or worse), yes.
If your point is that this growth was somehow "organic" ... well, I'd like a look at your dictionary, because this was absolutely engineered.