Perhaps this will be interesting to you: http://www.aei.org/publication/charts-of-the-day-creative-destruction-in-the-sp500-index/ http://www.aei.org/publicatio

Perhaps this will be interesting to you: http://www.aei.org/publication/charts-of-the-day-creative-destruction-in-the-sp500-index/ http://www.aei.org/publication/charts-of-the-day-creative-de... Dominant players get displaced all the time. Famous examples you've likely heard of include Kodak, Yahoo, and Sears. As for Google and Facebook -- people like the products. Consumers are happy. The people on HN concerned about privacy and wasted time advocate tools which have little traction in the market - things like DuckDuckGo (great tool btw.) Why? Because consumers don't care. If FB started charging $100/month for account access tomorrow, you'd better believe they'd be out of business pretty fast (so they won't). How is that a malevolent monopoly? But eventually, even they will make enough mistakes and be overtaken by more innovative companies, as difficult as that may be to consider right now.