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I believe that with network effects far more pervasive as things move online, monopoly/competition law needs to play a greater role. The basic idea is that any
by SiVal 8y ago
I believe that with network effects far more pervasive as things move online, monopoly/competition law needs to play a greater role. The basic idea is that any party that controls more than (TBD) percent of a significant market/distribution channel/medium/etc. (significance by total $, total # of users, etc., TBD) loses the right of a small, private party to unilaterally ban users.
If you create a FaceBook competitor, identical in every way except dozens of other users instead of hundreds of millions, it would not be a realistic alternative. Likewise for Twitter, or real estate listing services, and a growing number of other things where it's not the tech so much as the other users.
When network effects dominate, as is so common online, and users gradually lose the realistic ability to just switch to a different service with terms they like more, service providers must also lose the ability to impose any terms THEY like and to refuse service to users. What they can charge, who they can ban, etc., should become matters governed by regulators.
- nradov 8y agoThere's no objective, consistent way to define a "significant market" for highly differentiated products. What market is Facebook in? Is it all web sites? All mobile apps? All media? All social media? All communication tools? Those categories are totally subjective and arbitrary.
- mjevans 8y agoAs someone that refuses to use Facebook / etc... I still see the free speech issue in this. Imagine it from this perspective; whom can a telephone company decide to deny service? If they have stepped beyond merely disagreeable speech (and I agree, it's often very disagreeable) where was that line crossed so that our court system might process their transgressions?
- nradov 8y agoTelephony is a commodity service with a legally defined market. The rules for such services are irrelevant when deciding how to regulate non-commodity Internet services.
- SiVal 8y agoLegal status is frequently based on reasonableness. When you have a service with hundreds of millions of users, you already have a reasonable argument for "significant" even if the lower bound of significance is fuzzy. If you then survey the users of a giant system regarding practical alternatives, and the answer is overwhelmingly "even if there were one, I couldn't switch to an alternative offering the same features and price, because it would lack the critically important feature that everyone uses this one," you have a reasonable, practical, realistic means of identifying some of the entities that are too powerful, relative to their users, to be allowed to just do whatever they want with prices, who they will do business with, and any number of other policies. If you want complete freedom to refuse to do business with users for whatever reason you want, charge anyone whatever you want and change as you like, and so on, you can have it as long as your users can reasonably exercise similar freedoms by doing business with alternatives. If network effects remove those options from your users, they should remove them from you, too.