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When AT&T was a monopoly and you had to rent your phone from them at an outrageous price, you could also walk away. But having to either walk/drive around or se
by Xixi 8y ago
When AT&T was a monopoly and you had to rent your phone from them at an outrageous price, you could also walk away. But having to either walk/drive around or send slow mail to communicate was not very efficient. Perfectly doable, mind you, but very inconvenient. Sometimes the cost of walking away is just too steep, so abusing a dominant position becomes very easy and tempting.
I don't think Twitter or Facebook are anywhere close to that threshold. Maybe that's just because I barely use them. But I'm sure some people were also not using phone in the seventies, so I won't conclude based on my individual case.
- nine_k 8y agoWalking away from AT&T was hard because of the expense of building a phone transmission network, and (I suppose) because of some patents they held. Walking away from Twitter is much easier, because multiple global instant or near-instant messaging systems exist, including completely open and user-controlled systems, and even building a new such system is reasonably easy for a group of competent people.
- zipwitch 8y agoThe cost of getting everyone you wish to communicate with using the new system is non-trivial.
- Xixi 8y agoThat's looking at it from a purely technical perspective. A 20% better Twitter or Facebook (from a technical perspective) is certainly comparatively easy to do, but would still have an approximate value of nil. The value of Twitter or Facebook is not technical (though running services at this scale is technically very challenging): it comes from the people using it. Building another Facebook, even with marginal improvements, is never going to be enough to make enough people switch. So is the case for AT&T: even if you could build a network competing with the AT&T one it would still have been a largely useless endeavor, unless you could also force AT&T to be interoperable with your network.