| I agree with you. Besides "FB would have bought it," social media doesn't generally do "replacement." Nuanced differences in product lead to different products, because the "social" aspect is made of culture. Any replacement for tiktok wouldn't be a replacement. It'd be a different product in the social media space. One way or another, a tiktok ban benefits FB, whether they build a competitor, buy it, or their existing products pick up tiktok's market share. We are totally ill equipped to deal with modern monopolies. We weren't great at dealing with the old, monopolies. Now though, the laws, norms and political MOs are nearly irrelevant. One trite example is prices. The default way to "prove" the effect of monopolies historically has been price. Prices don't exist in social media. A deeper difference is the microeconomics. When Bell was being broken up, one big problem was creating viable component companies. If the courts screwed up and created failing child companies then telecommunications would be broken. This is a hard problem for a court, well outside their comfort zone. With social media the microeconomics is totally different. Even if FB disappeared, consumers would not lack for social media. The market is capable of replacing FB easily, all that's needed is for facebook to move aside. Commercial/profitability considerations are barely an issue. |