Is it a monopoly in the sense that everyone is forced to use it and Facebook is able to charge high fees, or do people have multiple options on the app store (signal, telegram, etc) and they just choose Whatsapp
In one corner, we have technologically behind the curve government bureaucrats and mediocre lawyers, in the other, we have bottomless pockets and the best lawyers money can buy...
We seem to have forgotten victories like GDPR, CCPA, and the Microsoft anti-trust case.
The Microsoft anti-trust case took the wind out of Microsoft's sails and kept the web free just long enough for new giants to emerge. (And Microsoft remains a 1T+ company. If anything, it made them stronger because they had to diversify and fight harder.)
If we (or Europe) try it again, we might see more wealth in more companies. More experiments. More innovation. Less moat defending, taxation, walled gardens, and comprehensive surveillance dragnets.
Having Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon own everything makes them all complacent iterators, data hoarders, tax collectors, and small business/innovation cripplers.
The anti-trust hammer is a powerful tool. It elevated our entire industry. We (through our elected officials) should wield it.
Yeah good luck with that Outlook. I think Steve Ballmer is the one who knocked the wind out of the sails and the sales of Microsoft more than the antitrust lawsuit but maybe I'm just crazy.
My own experience with Microsoft during the naughts was shortly after having unified Windows NT and consumer Windows through Windows XP, they scrapped it for a glorified CPU/GPU hardware land grab called Vista. And everything sucked again for another 5 years 100% unnecessarily.
As for GDPR and CCPA. Yeah, thanks a whole hell of a lot. The tech companies are just as creepy as they ever were, but now I have to fill out a form to acknowledge how creepy they are. So privacy, very security.
Go split Amazon into Amazon retail and Amazon Web Services. Go split Microsoft into Microsoft OS, Microsoft gaming, Microsoft office, and Microsoft Cloud Computing. Go smash Google into 10 or more independent companies. Pull any one of those things off and I'll be impressed. Otherwise it's all sound and fury to me but I guess it keeps the bureaucrats gainfully employed and off the streets so there's that.
The funny part is that the whole Microsoft antitrust thing was about Internet Explorer, which was always a crap-tastic web browser, and it has now more or less died off of natural causes because Google outcroptasticed them and Mozilla, despite abundant internal funding, squandered it all.