If they are, they are not a traditional monopolies. "Traditionally," crossing over a farmer's land entitled the farmer to extract a fee from you, no matter wha

If they are, they are not a traditional monopolies. "Traditionally," crossing over a farmer's land entitled the farmer to extract a fee from you, no matter what altitude you crossed over at. The law had to change once the technological reality changed. In this case, the supply of a good or service (social networking, webpage indexing and searching) are not controlled by Facebook and Google I think this is a bit of a sham. As you observe, the mere existence of website pages isn't worth anything by itself. What Facebook and Google have is massive, large scale user loyalty. Human attention, on timescales measured in hours or days, is still a finite resource. Human attention, measured on a per-capita basis is still a finite resource. If you just call it "loyalty" and make some kind of claim of market sacredness to your hard earned spoils, you're just obfuscating the finite nature of the resource the actual product is based on. Despite alternatives existing (Bing, Mastadon, DuckDuckGo, Myspace, etc.), users are voluntarily choosing to use Google and Facebook. This is not a monopoly, IMO. You're actually just begging for a special exception for network effect based monopolies.