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I'm more or less in agreement with you on all of those companies except Twitter. Twitter is a notable exception and absolutely does have a monopoly on the socia

I'm more or less in agreement with you on all of those companies except Twitter. Twitter is a notable exception and absolutely does have a monopoly on the social media sector as a "public square" - one which features almost every major politician, journalist, analyst, and activist on the platform, including at times, the US President and many other heads of state. And because of the network effect, this monopoly is unlikely to be challenged in the coming years. Twitter sought out exactly this kind of political influence, so I'm not sympathetic to any complaints they may have now that they have that influence and are in the spotlight. In an ideal world, Twitter would have been created as a government site and thus subject to the 1st Amendment, but given that we're not in that world, legislation is needed. I'm willing to concede the other social media companies you cited have competition and/or don't play the central role Twitter plays in the US political process. Finally, there would be Freedom of Association on Twitter even if it were subject to 1st Amendment rights - no one is forced to follow anyone, and everyone is free to block anyone at all. It should be almost exactly analogous to real-life: you should have the right to associate with whomever you like in our country, but you should not have the right to expel them from the country.

XorNot 5y ago
Except there's no barrier of entry to Twitter's marketplace. Twitter doesn't somehow prevent users installing other apps. They aren't a natural monopoly, seeing as how Facebook has been taking shots at that space for years. This bizarre HN notion that every big company is a "monopoly" needs to die. Being popular doesn't make you a monopoly.
- monoideism 5y ago
  I'm not really arguing from an antitrust perspective. My argument is more focused on the central role that Twitter plays in our political process. If you have a better word to use for that concept than "monopoly", I'll edit my post. But I'm sure you disagree with my thesis either way. That said, from an antitrust perspective, there are strong arguments against some social media companies, particularly Facebook. Furthermore, there is a barrier to entry for Twitter: the network effect. It's an incredibly strong barrier. Finally, of course not every big company is a monopoly.
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    The network effect is a big barrier until it isn't, and this can happen rather quickly. Digg. Myspace. Snap. Tumblr. Honestly even Facebook itself; how many young people are opening new accounts on Facebook? For now people have moved onto Instagram but this is the only trick I'm aware of pulled off successfully.
  - XorNot 5y ago
    You are not entitled to an audience. A monopoly requires an actual barrier, not a social one: i.e. physically limited space in telecommunication conduits in cities, for example.
    - wpietri 5y ago
      And I think you've put your finger on it. A lot of people confuse a right to free speech with a right to be heard. They are BIG MAD that they don't have a god-given right to a large platform. Not that they built the platform and not that they contribute to its upkeep. But they still have strong feelings of entitlement.
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    > My argument is more focused on the central role that Twitter plays in our political process. If you have a better word to use for that concept than "monopoly" What's the concept then, other than that Twitter is doing things that you don't like? That's obviously not a sufficient argument, and if antitrust law isn't the reason for legal action to be taken against them, what's the reason? The only other legal course I could imagine is significant changes to media laws (which I'm certainly not opposed to, but those seem more difficult to argue for than antitrust action), or perhaps going at it from the other side and changing the laws around how public figures must communicate with the public.
    - throwawaysea 5y ago
      A business doesn’t have to be a monopoly per the current legal definition for it to be subject to regulation. We can simply require social media companies to accept all customers. We can make political views a protected class that prevents denial of service at businesses in general. We can treat these tech companies as utilities because they operate the public town square. There are numerous routes for us to fix the current situation, where a small number of employees controlling these companies with billions of users, can become the sole arbiters of can communicate and what they can communicate. It just requires that we start talking about it, educate people about the problem, and build political will.
- donw 5y ago
  > Except there's no barrier of entry to Twitter's marketplace. There absolutely is. Twitter enjoys an incredible geographic monopoly. The territory just happens to be digital.
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  Monopoly is mostly a political definition throughout American history. The policies and laws have been shaped to target businesses not always strictly based on actual market definition in a textbook sense.
gowld 5y ago
The First Amendment has always applied to private property "town squares" that are open to public, originally this was decided in the case of indoor shopping malls.
- lmm 5y ago
  I think/hope there would be raised eyebrows if government agencies set up shop in private malls. Malls have realistic alternatives. Twitter doesn't, even for some government services.
- wpietri 5y ago
  I believe that's incorrect: https://www.freedomforuminstitute.org/about/faq/do-individuals-have-first-amendment-rights-on-others-private-property/ https://www.freedomforuminstitute.org/about/faq/do-individua... If you're thinking of Pruneyard v Robbins, that only applies in CA. And that wasn't based on the 1st Amendment, but on California's own constitution.
wpietri 5y ago
If Twitter's so incredibly powerful and important, why is it worth 5% of Facebook or 2% or Amazon (which owns Twitch) or Google (which owns YouTube)? That doesn't sound like a dominant market position to me. A large proportion of the people you mention are active on multiple platforms. Some of them aren't active on Twitter at all. Twitter does have a particular market niche, but it's only the 16th most popular platform in terms of global active users: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net... And freedom of association is a right that Twitter's owners also have. They are not obliged to serve anybody they don't want to.
- vineyardmike 5y ago
  So, I’m not going to claim if it’s a monopoly or not directly, but just provide new angles on this debate… Twitter may have an x% of market valuations of other companies… but that doesn’t have to be the only metric we base decisions off of. Amazon is more than twitch, so has a bigger evaluation. But obviously that other business doesn’t compete with Twitter. Twitter might account for (eg) 25% of phone use time (and say fb accounts for another x%). So maybe we define the market as user attention. That might make more sense than a strictly financial approach. Or maybe, like the OP said, Twitter has 90% of all political actors on it, when the next platform has only 25%. Or maybe it has 75% of all public political discourse. Maybe defining the market as saturation of politicians. After all, it’s way harder to compete if you have to convince all existing politicians to move. These metrics are harder to gather, but might be more useful to gauge how dominant Twitter is in the political sphere. When people discuss monopoly, they often don’t care about the (vague and interpreted) laws per se, they actually care about how a company has somehow come to be dominant and influential in a negative way. Throughout American history, antitrust rules has been used against mostly large businesses that were unpopular (politically and colloquially). Business and society had changed a lot, especially with the internet, so if there is a political push, defining monopoly policies against another target and definition is inevitable.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    Sure. Many things are possible. Twitter could be using an embedded hypnotron in their apps to control elite opinion. But when people are talking about effectively nationalizing one company because they don't like its moderation policies, I think we need more than speculation. And you might not care about why we have antitrust laws or how monopoly impairs free markets. But I sure do. If somebody wants to make the claim that Twitter has too much power in some way unrelated to monopoly, they're welcome to take a swing at that. But that's a very hard claim to make in that without an actual monopoly, I don't see a plausible mechanism for unfair dominance. Not only is it possible to compete with Twitter, many companies, some of them with vastly more resources, already do. I'd say the rise of TikTok demonstrates there's no particular barrier to entry, and Gab and Parler are eternally claiming success in attracting millions of users.
aliasEli 5y ago
I think a very important reason for Twitter's influence is that it is very easy to include tweets in an article. This saves editorial work. There is no need to paraphrase/extract parts of a longer article and so it mostly avoids the problems around incorrect quotes. It also makes attribution of your sources easier because the tweet is the source itself. Of course, Twitter is a horrible platform for nuanced opinions, but these do not seem to be very popular nowadays.

XorNot 5y ago

Except there's no barrier of entry to Twitter's marketplace. Twitter doesn't somehow prevent users installing other apps. They aren't a natural monopoly, seeing as how Facebook has been taking shots at that space for years. This bizarre HN notion that every big company is a "monopoly" needs to die. Being popular doesn't make you a monopoly.

monoideism 5y ago
I'm not really arguing from an antitrust perspective. My argument is more focused on the central role that Twitter plays in our political process. If you have a better word to use for that concept than "monopoly", I'll edit my post. But I'm sure you disagree with my thesis either way. That said, from an antitrust perspective, there are strong arguments against some social media companies, particularly Facebook. Furthermore, there is a barrier to entry for Twitter: the network effect. It's an incredibly strong barrier. Finally, of course not every big company is a monopoly.
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  The network effect is a big barrier until it isn't, and this can happen rather quickly. Digg. Myspace. Snap. Tumblr. Honestly even Facebook itself; how many young people are opening new accounts on Facebook? For now people have moved onto Instagram but this is the only trick I'm aware of pulled off successfully.
- XorNot 5y ago
  You are not entitled to an audience. A monopoly requires an actual barrier, not a social one: i.e. physically limited space in telecommunication conduits in cities, for example.
  - wpietri 5y ago
    And I think you've put your finger on it. A lot of people confuse a right to free speech with a right to be heard. They are BIG MAD that they don't have a god-given right to a large platform. Not that they built the platform and not that they contribute to its upkeep. But they still have strong feelings of entitlement.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  > My argument is more focused on the central role that Twitter plays in our political process. If you have a better word to use for that concept than "monopoly" What's the concept then, other than that Twitter is doing things that you don't like? That's obviously not a sufficient argument, and if antitrust law isn't the reason for legal action to be taken against them, what's the reason? The only other legal course I could imagine is significant changes to media laws (which I'm certainly not opposed to, but those seem more difficult to argue for than antitrust action), or perhaps going at it from the other side and changing the laws around how public figures must communicate with the public.
  - throwawaysea 5y ago
    A business doesn’t have to be a monopoly per the current legal definition for it to be subject to regulation. We can simply require social media companies to accept all customers. We can make political views a protected class that prevents denial of service at businesses in general. We can treat these tech companies as utilities because they operate the public town square. There are numerous routes for us to fix the current situation, where a small number of employees controlling these companies with billions of users, can become the sole arbiters of can communicate and what they can communicate. It just requires that we start talking about it, educate people about the problem, and build political will.
donw 5y ago
> Except there's no barrier of entry to Twitter's marketplace. There absolutely is. Twitter enjoys an incredible geographic monopoly. The territory just happens to be digital.
vineyardmike 5y ago
Monopoly is mostly a political definition throughout American history. The policies and laws have been shaped to target businesses not always strictly based on actual market definition in a textbook sense.

gowld 5y ago

The First Amendment has always applied to private property "town squares" that are open to public, originally this was decided in the case of indoor shopping malls.

lmm 5y ago
I think/hope there would be raised eyebrows if government agencies set up shop in private malls. Malls have realistic alternatives. Twitter doesn't, even for some government services.
wpietri 5y ago
I believe that's incorrect: https://www.freedomforuminstitute.org/about/faq/do-individuals-have-first-amendment-rights-on-others-private-property/ https://www.freedomforuminstitute.org/about/faq/do-individua... If you're thinking of Pruneyard v Robbins, that only applies in CA. And that wasn't based on the 1st Amendment, but on California's own constitution.

wpietri 5y ago

If Twitter's so incredibly powerful and important, why is it worth 5% of Facebook or 2% or Amazon (which owns Twitch) or Google (which owns YouTube)? That doesn't sound like a dominant market position to me. A large proportion of the people you mention are active on multiple platforms. Some of them aren't active on Twitter at all. Twitter does have a particular market niche, but it's only the 16th most popular platform in terms of global active users: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net... And freedom of association is a right that Twitter's owners also have. They are not obliged to serve anybody they don't want to.

vineyardmike 5y ago
So, I’m not going to claim if it’s a monopoly or not directly, but just provide new angles on this debate… Twitter may have an x% of market valuations of other companies… but that doesn’t have to be the only metric we base decisions off of. Amazon is more than twitch, so has a bigger evaluation. But obviously that other business doesn’t compete with Twitter. Twitter might account for (eg) 25% of phone use time (and say fb accounts for another x%). So maybe we define the market as user attention. That might make more sense than a strictly financial approach. Or maybe, like the OP said, Twitter has 90% of all political actors on it, when the next platform has only 25%. Or maybe it has 75% of all public political discourse. Maybe defining the market as saturation of politicians. After all, it’s way harder to compete if you have to convince all existing politicians to move. These metrics are harder to gather, but might be more useful to gauge how dominant Twitter is in the political sphere. When people discuss monopoly, they often don’t care about the (vague and interpreted) laws per se, they actually care about how a company has somehow come to be dominant and influential in a negative way. Throughout American history, antitrust rules has been used against mostly large businesses that were unpopular (politically and colloquially). Business and society had changed a lot, especially with the internet, so if there is a political push, defining monopoly policies against another target and definition is inevitable.
- wpietri 5y ago
  Sure. Many things are possible. Twitter could be using an embedded hypnotron in their apps to control elite opinion. But when people are talking about effectively nationalizing one company because they don't like its moderation policies, I think we need more than speculation. And you might not care about why we have antitrust laws or how monopoly impairs free markets. But I sure do. If somebody wants to make the claim that Twitter has too much power in some way unrelated to monopoly, they're welcome to take a swing at that. But that's a very hard claim to make in that without an actual monopoly, I don't see a plausible mechanism for unfair dominance. Not only is it possible to compete with Twitter, many companies, some of them with vastly more resources, already do. I'd say the rise of TikTok demonstrates there's no particular barrier to entry, and Gab and Parler are eternally claiming success in attracting millions of users.

aliasEli 5y ago

I think a very important reason for Twitter's influence is that it is very easy to include tweets in an article. This saves editorial work. There is no need to paraphrase/extract parts of a longer article and so it mostly avoids the problems around incorrect quotes. It also makes attribution of your sources easier because the tweet is the source itself. Of course, Twitter is a horrible platform for nuanced opinions, but these do not seem to be very popular nowadays.