Lots of questions in this thread asking the obvious-yet-difficult question of "in what market / in what sense does FB have a monopoly?" I think Ben Thompson ha

Lots of questions in this thread asking the obvious-yet-difficult question of "in what market / in what sense does FB have a monopoly?" I think Ben Thompson has the analysis right here. High-level summary: https://stratechery.com/2019/tech-and-antitrust/ https://stratechery.com/2019/tech-and-antitrust/ Facebook-specific analysis: https://stratechery.com/2017/why-facebook-shouldnt-be-allowed-to-buy-tbh/ https://stratechery.com/2017/why-facebook-shouldnt-be-allowe... With the key bit of analysis being (from the latter): > Facebook, for its part, had, for better or worse, transitioned to a public app that not only handled symmetric relationships, but, at least according to perception, asymmetric broadcast as well; that, though, left an opening for an app like Snapchat. Thus Facebook’s acquisition drive: the company had already secured Instagram, giving it a position in asymmetric ephemeral broadcast apps; Snapchat rebuffed advances, so the company soon moved on to WhatsApp. > The importance of these two acquisitions cannot be overstated: Facebook has always been secure in its dominance of permanent social relationships, a position that has given the company a dominant position in digital advertising. However, while everyone may need a permanent place on the Internet (all of those teenagers people say Facebook needs to reach have Facebook accounts), the ultimate currency is attention, and much like real life, it is ephemeral conversation that dominates. Facebook, by virtue of early decisions around privacy and significant bad press about the dangers of revealing too much, was locked out of this sphere, so it bought in. So if we segment the markets along the lines that consumers tend to intuitively percieve, FB has monopoly over public symmetric (personal) social networking. That seems like a coherent market segment definition to me. Though of course that's a lot of qualifiers so I could easily see someone objecting that they are arbitrary/post-hoc. As a separate point, perhaps someone with legal expertise can comment on this one - I'm curious why the FTC's complaint relied on establishing a monopoly; the Sherman Act doesn't actually require establishing a monopoly; anticompetitive conduct that attempts to establish a harmful monopoly is also illegal (e.g. see https://www.justice.gov/atr/competition-and-monopoly-single-firm-conduct-under-section-2-sherman-act-chapter-1 https://www.justice.gov/atr/competition-and-monopoly-single-...). It seems obvious to me that FB's acquisitions were primarily intended to acquire a monopoly (if they didn't already have one), indeed Zuckerberg explicitly stated that he was trying to prevent a competitor from emerging in the emails that were in these court cases.