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by machinehermit
2179 days ago
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Facebook obviously posses some interesting questions on various topics but framing the debate as Facebook collecting "monopoly rents" is ridiculous. I haven't used Facebook since 2010 and I have never used Instagram. If someone in my social network wants to send me some information they have my number and they can txt me. If someone wants to send me a picture they can do the same. I don't use Facebook because ultimately for me it is completely redundant. To call Facebook a monopoly is an analogy at best. You are not going to solve these problems through analogy though, these are uniquely new problems. |
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Google and Facebook are the only games in town for online advertising these days; the fact both are making incredible amounts of money means either competitors aren't good enough, or are being priced out of the market, or squeezed out of it (due to network effects or anti-competitively).
For Google - the vast majority of whose income comes from search ads - there is no network effect. They are mostly much better (I try Bing every now and then, it's not even close; I set up ddg as my main search, but have to reach for google for about 1/3 of searches). However, they also employ tactics one could consider anticompetitive, e.g. paying Apple billions/year to be the default search engine on iPhones. YouTube does have a network-effect lock in, but AFAIK that's not really a revenue source for google. It does complete the advertising offering and keep newcomers out, though.
For Facebook - they are hardly doing anything better than competitors; it's all about the network effect. And they've been VERY busy making sure that every network which is big enough (or even growing quickly enough) to have its own network effect is either theirs (instagram, whatsapp) or sidelined (snapchat).
IIRC They paid $60M for Onavo - providing discounted bandwidth "safely encrypted" from the prying eyes of user's ISP but totally visible to Facebook, which gave them a real-time sample of application and website use -- which gave them the insight needed to purchase rising stars Instagram and reigning king WhatsApp (and attack Snapchat after they refused a buyout offer).
You are not Facebook's customer. You are a user, Facebook's product, sold to Facebook's customers, the advertisers.
Facebook and Google have a duopoly on online advertising (which, especially now with lockdown, but even independently, is nowadays much of advertising). There are unique new problems with these new models, but Facebook is definitely one part of a duopoly, and likely a monopoly by any existing legal definition.