I think distinguishing consumer and producer monopolies might be valuable here. Google and Amazon can only be monopolistic and predatory towards producers on th

I think distinguishing consumer and producer monopolies might be valuable here. Google and Amazon can only be monopolistic and predatory towards producers on their platforms - the sites they rank in search, the ads they sell, the videos uploaded, the sellers of things. Because they have all the audience, anyone trying to get views online, buy ads, upload videos, sell things etc are throwing out a huge majority of the market by not using these two. There can definitely be a case against them there. But those are just because they made products consumers want to use. There is no opportunity cost to switching search engine or store website. It takes a line of text to move to duckduckgo, bing, startpage, etc from Google. It takes a moment to move over to walmart, target, ebay, overstock, newegg, etc from Amazon. Neither can be overtly predatory towards the consumers of their platforms because they have no way to lock them in without taking over the whole Internet (and yeah, Google is trying that with AMP, but I doubt they will ever have enough of the Internet under their control to start restricting / banning non-AMP sites in Chrome - if they ever did that its the most blatant monopoly abuse case since Comcast). Speaking of Comcast, they are the other side of the coin. Comcast has sheer market dominance, uses their size to buy out and kill competition and bribe politicians, and leaves their "customers" with no alternatives while they abuse them. For about 95% of Comcasts market base your options are Comcast or move somewhere without Comcast. That is a blatant, consumer harming monopoly. Online, Facebook is damn close to that. You cannot easily switch to Facebook competitors because social networking is defined by network effects - Facebook is infrastructure as much as search is, but one requires the people you want to be on it while the other just needs to index the sites you want to find. Anyone can index websites, only Facebook can have everyone in your extended family on it. And Facebook surely uses its monopoly position to exploit and abuse its consumers. I just like making the distinction between the two. Both are dangerous, but for most of us the threat of Google and Amazon isn't direct, its to the businesses and services we want to use that we access through them. But it remains our choice to give Google and Amazon that power, choices you don't have with Comcast or even Facebook. As long as I can have a voice in the efficacy of their monopolies I simply feel less threatened by them.