> Is it not possible that this mechanism by which the most popular product is the most attractive one (to prospective employees and employers in our example; in

> Is it not possible that this mechanism by which the most popular product is the most attractive one (to prospective employees and employers in our example; in another example it might be people wanting to make phone calls) -- thereby making that product even more popular -- could create what grandparent referred to as a "natural monopoly" even in a completely unregulated market? You must realize that you're describing a free product, right? The way people organize around free things is totally different to something they pay for. People are incentivized to not pay for bad service when better options exist. And the worse the service or the higher the price, the higher the incentive. Entrepreneurs are incentivized to enter a market under those conditions. The more opportunity they see, the more likely they are to enter the market. The only way to prevent competition is to provide such good service that there's no room for competition (which I can't see a problem with), or to raise the barrier to entry with state policies. > You might reply that Microsoft could not have achieved its monopoly without the enforcement of copyright laws by governments. Well, consider an alternative reality in which there is no copyright law, but Windows is distributed only with new PCs and runs inside a cryptographically-secure enclave. I don't think what you're describing would stop anything, but it sure would make using a computer more onerous and likely push away a lot of customers. > In other words, there are purely technical ways to achieve the same business goal that was in actuality achieved by copyright law. There just aren't the same tools available to firms when software can be freely modified and redistributed.