| Dunno if you're still interested, but here's my clarifications. What makes reddit great is the millions of users. Millions of user are instrumental to its success and popularity. However, reddit can still exist if no one used it. It wouldn't be very successful or popular, but it can still exist. I fully agree a one person reddit is useless, but useless != impossible to exist. In the network case, you make a good point. However, I think there is still a distinction to be made between an entity that lives on the internet vs an entity that supplies the internet, which I think goes back to the original barrier to entry argument. If you decided reddit was awful, you could conceivably run your own with fairly little cost. On the other hand, digging up your street, putting up poles, buying switches etc is far more capital intensive, and that's just a network for two people! Even if both groups are shitty, one is clearly prohibitively more costly than the other. This distinction warrants a difference in treatment, where the ISP is subject to NN but reddit is not. To put it another way, it's totally reasonable to create a parallel reddit, so much so that several exist. It may be popular, but it's reasonably possible. Creating parallel internet infrastructure is downright inconceivable. No one in their right mind would think laying fiber optic cable across the pacific for a parallel network is a workable idea because local_ISP is awful. A monopoly isn't just defined by being popular and having a large market share. It needs to have several other features, one of the ones I think is especially important is price control. Google/Apple/reddit do not have price control, the ISP does. Wikipedia has an excellent article on monopolies. |