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by Slansitartop 2989 days ago
> I'm trying to think of what it is, exactly, that Facebook has a monopoly on. The nearest I can come up with is: Facebook has a monopoly on Facebook users.

Perhaps Facebook could be thought of as a monopoly because 1) it has no clear, direct competitors, and 2) it's taken action to buy up anything that could become one [1]?

[1] successfully with Instagram and WhatsApp, and attempted with SnapChat

> The followup question would be: how can that be broken up?

It could be divested of Instagram and WhatsApp, for starters. I think its core facebook.com could also be split up in a way to increase competition further: randomly divide its users between multiple successor networks with a mandate to provide an open API for inter-operation.

1 comments

Even if you accept that, if FB buys up any aspiring competitors, that makes it profitable to compete with it.