> The analogy with the railroads simply is not apt, their monopoly was so powerful because there was often no other way to get from point A to point B, so they had complete leverage.
I still believe the analogy holds, just substitute geographical points A and B with person A and person B (or business A to potential client B), and the similarities are obviously clear. There is often no other way to get from person A to person B than to use Facebook, or from person C to D without Twitter, ... . Yes, there are various social networks, but there was also various railway barons. Just like the railway was not a single nationwide monopoly, but instead a series of smaller regional monopolies, a single social network is not an all encompassing internet-wide monopoly, but instead a monopoly lording over a subgroup.
> There is often no other way to get from person A to person B than to use Facebook, or from person C to D without Twitter, ... . Yes, there are various social networks, but there was also various railway barons
Is that really accurate, though?
How many people use a single social network? And regarding market power, very few companies do their online marketing on a single social network; they usually have a general strategy that they deploy on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.
Anecdote: facebook is the only social network where I am listed under my actual name. Until some highly adopted internet address book exists, the only option for many old friends to contact me is FB at this point.
Dividing your attention between two different messaging apps is more than twice as inconvenient/costly as having just one. If the first company to lay tracks could force later companies to charge double for journeys along their parallel tracks, then that would be a clearly anti-competitive situation.
The situation is even worse with messaging apps than with railroads, though, since there is a coordination problem between customers/users of each service, rather than each customer/user being able to make their choice of service in isolation. It's very hard for a messaging service to compete if it requires users to ruin the experience of not just themselves but also at least one of their friends.
It is not worse at all. Have you ever seen the movie There Will Be Blood? The local railroad monopolies were used to drive competitors out of other markets, like oil, by cutting off the ability of those market participants to transport their products. Getting multiple messaging notifications from different apps is not anywhere within the same ballpark as this...
It's really just so insane that the complaint being ascribed to monopoly power is that it's a tad inconvenient to use the many freely available competitive products. Yeah! That's what a market that isn't monopolized is like! There are lots of competing products, which is often less convenient than if everyone were using a single monopoly product!
> Have you ever seen the movie There Will Be Blood?
Nope. Have you ever read the article "Facebook is censoring links to competitor social network Tsu and deleting old mentions"?[0]
> There are lots of competing products, which is often less convenient than if everyone were using a single monopoly product!
If I drive a Ford then it doesn't inconvenience me if someone else drives a Honda. This is equivalent to a market where messengers use an interoperable protocol, like email. The "less convenient" world you are describing is one where some roads can only be driven on by Ford cars, and others only by Hondas, causing people to choose their destinations based on which make of car they have.
You are seriously overemphasizing the import of very minor inconveniences. The world doesn't owe you a maximally convenient well integrated instant messaging ecosystem!
I think it's very lame that Facebook would censor links to a competing site (if that is indeed what they're doing, which I'm happy to stipulate), but Facebook is not in any way the only way for people to see links to that site. Contemporary society provides that site a ridiculously giant number of ways to get the word out. There are lots of other sites where people can share the links, they can buy ads in articles, they can optimize to appear in search results, they can encourage people to share by word of mouth in messaging, email, and real life, they can buy billboards or ads in subway cars or lots of other things. I am not exaggerating when I say that it has never been easier to get the word out about something. That doesn't mean it's easy, it's just that it's always been hard and it's much easier now. This is why advertising has always been big business.
The Facebook of today didn't exist when Facebook was new. How did they ever get the word out and get engagement? They figured out other ways! Facebook is just not a necessary component of spreading the word about a new site. It's very useful, but also very possible to route around it.
> The world doesn't owe you a maximally convenient well integrated instant messaging ecosystem!
The world also doesn't owe Facebook monopoly power over people's social graphs either, and yet Facebook is able to wield that to some extent. In case you think that this is something that Facebook achieved on its own merits, rather than being granted by society/government, it's worth considering the extent to which copyright and hacking laws are used to prevent interoperability.[0]
More generally, though, I believe that profit-seeking corporations should only exist to serve society, and therefore corporations do owe us minimally inconvenient products, however we decide to define "inconvenient" (and taking into account society's other goals, such as employment).
> it has never been easier to get the word out about something.
I think that is a reasonable assumption, but I think it's also true that it's never been easier to travel anywhere in the world, and yet local monopolies of railroads are still bad for society and should be regulated against.
Speaking in absolutes, you absolutely could go door to door and hope to find me, but for say, my class in highschool, FB would be their only reasonable way.
I still believe the analogy holds, just substitute geographical points A and B with person A and person B (or business A to potential client B), and the similarities are obviously clear. There is often no other way to get from person A to person B than to use Facebook, or from person C to D without Twitter, ... . Yes, there are various social networks, but there was also various railway barons. Just like the railway was not a single nationwide monopoly, but instead a series of smaller regional monopolies, a single social network is not an all encompassing internet-wide monopoly, but instead a monopoly lording over a subgroup.