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I know this is the inevitable and cliche pushback, but it never seems to be grappled with so it remains worth pointing out: none of the three things you mention

I know this is the inevitable and cliche pushback, but it never seems to be grappled with so it remains worth pointing out: none of the three things you mentioned are anywhere close to monopolies. There are lots of social networks (Twitter and TikTok are extremely successful, among others), lots of ways to search the internet, and lots of ways to shop online. The analogy with the railroads simply is not apt, their monopoly was so powerful because there was often no other way to get from point A to point B, so they had complete leverage. This is not the case for any of these companies you listed, there is a lot of competition in all these markets. But I also think there are major issues with the current configuration of the tech industry! They just aren't because of monopolies. It is not helpful to misdiagnose a real problem. It is not helpful to have only a hammer and call every problem a nail.

hardtke 5y ago
The monopoly is not on the consumer side, it is on the advertising side. Google and Facebook are the only companies that have access to data on basically every sale on the internet (almost every site that uses their ad tools reports back their sales). This data gives them a defensible duopoly on digital advertising.
- spaced-out 5y ago
  > Google and Facebook are the only companies that have access to data on basically every sale on the internet Amazon? eBay? WeChat?
  - hardtke 5y ago
    Sites report their data back to Google analytics and Facebook by implementing their pixels. People don't do this for Amazon, ebay, wechat.
    - sanderjd 5y ago
      Amazon actually does have a quickly growing ads business FWIW.
- sanderjd 5y ago
  This argument makes way more sense, but it is also not well handled by existing anti-trust law and a much better response would be new regulation. Edit: It also doesn't speak to any of the issues with Amazon. (Also interestingly, Amazon's own advertising business is increasingly making this a tri-opoly.)
mrkurt 5y ago
Antitrust is much broader than "monopolies". It's all about concentrated power. Saying "monopoly" is just shorthand for market power, it's not a binary definition.
- sanderjd 5y ago
  > Antitrust is much broader than "monopolies". I'm with you here. > Saying "monopoly" is just shorthand for market power, it's not a binary definition. No, the word "monopoly" has an actual definition.
  - colinmhayes 5y ago
    You can waste time on semantics or you accept that practically everyone means "company that abuses their overwhelming market power to create friction in the market" when they say monopoly.
    - sanderjd 5y ago
      It isn't semantics. You want to use the word monopoly to mean something different than what it means. Feel free to make the more nuanced point about "abusing market power", but if you're building your argument around the word monopoly, you need to be using that word to mean what it means.
      - colinmhayes 5y ago
        I mean I agree, just pointing out that you're not really convincing anyone here and complaining about this isn't very productive since you, I, and everyone else here understands what is meant.
        sanderjd 5y ago
        I seriously doubt that's true. I'm sure I'm not convincing any of the people debating me in their own comments, but there are always other people reading the debate, who don't have as strong of preconceptions as the people commenting, and I suspect at least a few such people have thought to themselves "hmmm, yeah, he's right, those don't seem like monopolies". (I'm sure there are people being convinced of the opposite too.) It's a mistake to think the audience for a public discussion is limited to the people commenting. Edit to add: And to the "everyone knows what is meant". No, that's not true, lots of people have become confused by the usage of the word "monopoly" to describe the issues with big tech companies, through its pervasive usage in congressional hearings and media. Using confusing inaccurate language is not harmless, it confuses the debate.
politician 5y ago
When a system has two billion users, then it is the world's largest government. It really doesn't matter if it meets one nation's definition of monopoly. Facebook literally rivals the Catholic Church for participation. Zuck is literally the Pope of his own empire.
- alisonkisk 5y ago
  Well, not literally, but spiritually.
awillen 5y ago
This right here. I own an e-commerce business, and I sell on Amazon, but I do about 10x the revenue on my own site that I do on Amazon. I'm in no way unique in this regard - for all of the talk of how much Amazon dominates e-commerce, the reality is that it's never been easier to successfully run your own e-commerce site (just look at Shopify's market cap). Sure, if you're selling totally commoditized goods that's a different story, but even there you've got substantial enough web presences from retailers like Walmart and Target that Amazon still can't reasonably be called a monopoly.
mywittyname 5y ago
You're right on the technicals, but the GP is right in spirit. It seems like society needs a term for the concept of a company accumulating far too much power, and that we need laws similar to anti-trust laws, that apply to these companies. This is an incredibly difficult problem to address specifically because FB is not a classic monopoly. I'm not even sure what it would mean to "break them up". Amazon, MS, Apple, and Google are all far easier to split up. Each company has logical seams to split at (i.e., aws/retail, gcp/search/android, itunes/devices, etc). You could split FB and insta, but that doesn't really curb FB's power and influence at all.
- SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
  Isn't the term just "too powerful"? It seems to me that the reason we don't have laws against companies being too powerful is that most people don't think it's a big deal for companies to be too powerful, as long as they're not monopolies.
  - lotsofpulp 5y ago
    If people thought an entity was “too powerful”, then they would want a law against the entity, otherwise the word “too” does not mean anything. The reason there is no law against being “too powerful” is because it is a nebulous description that is not enforceable in a fair manner.
    - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
      I kinda fundamentally reject the premise here. When I say that a sandwich is "too expensive", I don't mean that there ought to be a law against selling sandwiches for that price.
      - lotsofpulp 5y ago
        The context is dealing with the problem of the existence of a too powerful company. Dealing with a too expensive sandwich requires no laws.
stevetodd 5y ago
Remember that you are the product and not the customer for these companies. Google’s customers are the advertisers who pay and (I’d argue) those who want to show up in search results. You have to either pay for ads or play their algorithm game to be relevant because of their monopoly position on search. It’s basically the same story for Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc.
- sanderjd 5y ago
  But this argument still seems to rely on "monopoly position on search", when there are in fact a number of search engines.
  - missedthecue 5y ago
    And additionally, the switching cost for users to change search engines is literally zero. It takes all of 2 seconds and opening a new tab. There are no contract cancellations or negotiating or payment loss. It costs zero dollars and zero time. Google owns a huge portion of search simply because they have the best product.
SkeuomorphicBee 5y ago
> The analogy with the railroads simply is not apt, their monopoly was so powerful because there was often no other way to get from point A to point B, so they had complete leverage. I still believe the analogy holds, just substitute geographical points A and B with person A and person B (or business A to potential client B), and the similarities are obviously clear. There is often no other way to get from person A to person B than to use Facebook, or from person C to D without Twitter, ... . Yes, there are various social networks, but there was also various railway barons. Just like the railway was not a single nationwide monopoly, but instead a series of smaller regional monopolies, a single social network is not an all encompassing internet-wide monopoly, but instead a monopoly lording over a subgroup.
- sanderjd 5y ago
  There is absolutely other ways to get between those people in all those cases. That's exactly why it doesn't hold.
  - monetus 5y ago
    Speaking in absolutes, you absolutely could go door to door and hope to find me, but for say, my class in highschool, FB would be their only reasonable way.
  - dane-pgp 5y ago
    You could also walk between point A and point B, but that doesn't mean that rail monopolies aren't a problem.
    - sanderjd 5y ago
      There are other equivalent ways. Using iMessage is not like walking compared to Messenger, it's just parallel railroad tracks.
      - dane-pgp 5y ago
        Dividing your attention between two different messaging apps is more than twice as inconvenient/costly as having just one. If the first company to lay tracks could force later companies to charge double for journeys along their parallel tracks, then that would be a clearly anti-competitive situation. The situation is even worse with messaging apps than with railroads, though, since there is a coordination problem between customers/users of each service, rather than each customer/user being able to make their choice of service in isolation. It's very hard for a messaging service to compete if it requires users to ruin the experience of not just themselves but also at least one of their friends.
HWR_14 5y ago
The question posed by the monopolies is not "are these the only options". But do these wield too much market power to be controlled by the market. That is, sure, Bing and DDG make up 5% of the global search, but is that enough. Yes, people use Twitter and TikTok, but does that replace the social graph of FB? Yes, I can buy directly online from many places, but if people are going to Amazon instead of Google to search for prices does it matter? So, my question to you, if every non-Google search engine published their formula for rankings, and SEO for going up all their rankings was mutually exclusive with going up in Google's rankings, do you believe any site would implement them? I doubt anyone would trade higher status on every other engine for lower status on Google. And in that case, they may as well be a monopoly.
- oconnor663 5y ago
  I don't know what the formal definitions of any of these things are, but I assume (hope?) that it's important not to equate being successful with being a monopoly by definition. If Ford came out with an amazing new car tomorrow, and suddenly 95% of new cars purchased were Fords, we probably shouldn't initiate trust-busting action against Ford on that basis alone. We want car companies to try to capture market share by making better cars. I don't know exactly how we contend with this definitional problem, but intuitively I think it should have something to do with prices and behavior. For example, if we were a fly on the wall in a Google exec meeting, we might be curious about whether they're jacking up the price of ads because they know no one can compete with them, or whether they're sensitive to charging more than their smaller competitors do. If they're behaving like their competitors are a serious threat, then intuitively they're probably not a monopoly, and it probably doesn't make sense to trust-bust them. But anyway I'm not a lawyer, and I don't know what the current thinking is about any of this stuff.
  - tablespoon 5y ago
    > I don't know what the formal definitions of any of these things are, but I assume (hope?) that it's important not to equate being successful with being a monopoly by definition. If Ford came out with an amazing new car tomorrow, and suddenly 95% of new cars purchased were Fords, we probably shouldn't initiate trust-busting action against Ford on that basis alone. We want car companies to try to capture market share by making better cars. There's an important difference between "capturing market share" and "capturing too much the market share." If Ford's going to put its competitors out of business, turn them into niche players, or even just get into a position where it can rest on its laurels for a few decades, our primary concern is no longer making sure Ford can be rewarded. Honestly, I don't see the downside of regularly breaking up a #1 player with too much market share into successors that are the #2 and #3 payers (and forcing major shareholders to divest one or the other). I want companies to be competing to get to the top, but once they get there, give them a prize for their effort and send them back down. From my experience as a customer, Amazon's e-commerce operation hasn't improved much (e.g. their search is still as shitty as ever) and has arguably regressed in many ways (e.g. more shady products and fake reviews) in the last decade. That's pretty strong signal to me that they're not under enough competitive pressure.
ncallaway 5y ago
> none of the three things you mentioned are anywhere close to monopolies. I think it depends on what you consider "the market" to be. If I want to compare Amazon to the "Global Retail Market" (Amazon's preferred framing), then maybe they aren't in a monopolistic position. But I—as ab individual—don't participate in the Global Retail Market. I participate in the "online US retail" and "Pacific Northwest retail" market. So I don't get much benefit out of there being more competition to Amazon in France, so the "Global Retail Market" doesn't seem like it's always the right framing. For me, it's still the case that Amazon doesn't feel like a monopoly, but I could imagine areas where Amazon is much closer to being one of just a small number of options for many products. Similarly, I'm sure Facebook wants to be evaluated against _all_ communication media, but again I want to communicate with people in my immediate network. If 100% of my social network and business contacts used exclusively Facebook for communication, then from _my_ perspective Facebook might have a monopoly on my communication options (even if they have real competition in China from competitors). I'm not so convinced that we should just accept the broadest possible interpretation of "the market" that we should evaluate as the correct framing. From the perspective of some individuals, if there is only a single dominant option, then that person still needs to deal with anti-trust issues. It's similar to the way some of the major internet players will carve up the country into regions of fairly exclusive offerings. Across US broadband, the market may be divided amongst a number of different players such that it doesn't appear to be a monopoly. But when you zoom in to an individual municipality, it might be that there _is_ a monopoly at that level, and the competition that appears to exist in the "national market" is actual a union of separate monopolies (and other regions where there is actual competition). So, while I totally agree with you that under the legal definitions of monopolies, many of these entities are not there, under individuals _practical_ definition of monopolies, many of these entities _are_ monopolistic.
- sanderjd 5y ago
  > I think it depends on what you consider "the market" to be. It honestly doesn't. None of these are monopolies by any market definition. Amazon has so many competitors: brick and mortar stores like Walmart and Target and Best Buy remain successful, online competitors again like Walmart and Target and Best Buy but also Ebay and in a different way Shopify and others, are also successful. Your argument is slightly stronger in the case of Facebook, but still very weak. Facebook's social networks have strong direct competition in Twitter and TikTok. Facebook's communication platforms have strong competitors in iMessage, SMS apps, Signal, Telegram, Discord, etc. I'm not 'accept[ing] the broadest possible interpretation of "the market"', I'm just not accepting hand-wavy non-definitions of "market" that only include a single company so that it can be called a monopoly by definition. Again, I think there are major problems and I favor new regulations for all of those problems. But what I don't think makes sense at all is redefining "monopoly" in a way that makes no sense, just because anti-trust law is our only extant tool for solving the problems caused by enormous tech firms.
supercanuck 5y ago
They most certainly are monopolies and we can see it in their behavior. What America is figuring out that, if the US Markets are going to remain uncompetitive, than Chinese companies that don't play by the same rules are going to outcompete these lethargic companies that don't want to get better but instead vacuum up all their competitors. This hurts American's technology advantage and competitiveness in the global marketplace. >Again, according to the complaint, Facebook chose to buy an emerging threat rather than compete, and announced an agreement in February 2014 to acquire WhatsApp for $19 billion. >The complaint also alleges that Facebook, over many years, has imposed anticompetitive conditions on third-party software developers’ access to valuable interconnections to its platform, such as the application programming interfaces (“APIs”) that allow the developers’ apps to interface with Facebook. In particular, Facebook allegedly has made key APIs available to third-party applications only on the condition that they refrain from developing competing functionalities, and from connecting with or promoting other social networking services. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2020/12/ftc-sues-facebook-illegal-monopolization https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2020/12/ftc-s...
- sanderjd 5y ago
  > They most certainly are monopolies and we can see it in their behavior. This is not true for all the reasons I already pointed out in my comment. You can't just wish this away. You need some other theory of the case. I agree with you that all those things are bad, but those bad things just don't flow from monopoly, they flow from some other problem.
  - supercanuck 5y ago
    Take it up with the FTC and Tim Wu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Wu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Wu) then, you obviously are more in the know than they are.
    - sanderjd 5y ago
      The FTC is free to make the arguments you and others are making here. I would bet you large sums of money that those arguments will not prevail. In fact I'm quite sure they won't bring cases using those arguments because they know that and don't want to be embarrassed. They will probably bring different arguments and also lobby for other regulatory changes, and I'm all for all of that, but they won't come to court saying "Amazon has a monopoly on e-commerce", because lawyers don't like it when judges laugh at them.
throwaway894345 5y ago
The obvious problem with considering social network platforms as interchangeable competitors is that they... aren't interchangeable at all. A user can't pack up and go to a different platform because their actual social network (i.e., relationships between humans) is only accessible on one platform. For example, my colleagues are on Twitter but not Mastodon. I can't leave Twitter without leaving my social network. Why does Twitter own access to my colleagues? Why should we allow that to be a competitive advantage? It's certainly at-odds with the principle of innovation--you're not on a platform because it's more innovative than another platform, you're on it because they have a monopoly on your social network. Contrary to your claim, there's very little competition in these markets because corporate ownership of user social networks is an enormous moat. Not only can users not easily move to another platform, but advertisers can't easily spend their money on some new platform because the new platform is much smaller in all likelihood.
- mikkergp 5y ago
  The 'my colleagues are on twitter by not mastodon' example doesn't feel salient to me. The best example would probably be MMORPG's. Should people who play WoW have access to people who play FFIV? I guess the question would be is social networking more a communications utility like a cell phone or e-mail, or is it more of a recreational activity. Personally I've never felt like not being on facebook took access away from my friends the way not having a phone would. Oddly no one talks about LinkedIn being a monopoly which feels like a more substantive example, since not being on LinkedIn may impact job opportunities. But not being on facebook, instagram, or twitter feels more like I won't be able to recreate with my friends/family and less like I won't be able to communicate with them.
  - throwaway894345 5y ago
    I think the MMORPG example is off for a few reasons: 1. The primary product of an MMORPG isn’t access to a social network. 2. The social networks in these games is far smaller than social media platforms (we don’t usually worry about anti-trust for tiny markets) 3. As you mentioned, social media platforms are communications/infrastructure, not recreation.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
The railroads weren't total monopolies, they were just local monopolies. If you didn't like them you could just move somewhere else, to another place with a local monopoly. Which is not the same as competition.
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  Sounds like the current situation with broadband ISPs.
bmitc 5y ago
I made a comment recently addressing these very things. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28851867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28851867 My contention summarized is that using market share as it has historically been used is not good, because these software-based companies can scale to much greater power than ever before whereas in the past, one had to gain significant market share to wield the same or even less power.
- dahfizz 5y ago
  I think you and OP agree. Tech giants are clearly "too powerful" and need to be dealt with, but the traditional formulation of monopoly power is not a good way to deal with these tech giants.
  - sanderjd 5y ago
    Yep! We do agree. I wouldn't have commented if people were saying "these companies have too much power" because I agree. But they aren't monopolies.
joe_the_user 5y ago
But I also think there are major issues with the current configuration of the tech industry! They just aren't because of monopolies. It is not helpful to misdiagnose a real problem. It is not helpful to have only a hammer and call every problem a nail. Yeah, the situation involves a contradictory litany of complaints. Google/Facebook/etc are terrible because they suppress free speech and terrible because they allow it. They're terrible because monopolize online advertising and terrible because they facilitate it. The purpose of breaking up a monopoly is to allow competition to facilitate the provisioning of whatever good a monopoly provides. Lots of people imagine breaking up or regulating Facebook will prevent the variety of abuses that we see. But if you look at the "competitive Internet", you can observe a sea of garbage in the form of endless popups, malware and eCommerce fraud. Things seem little more thought-out than "I want this to stop", which is hardly a recipe for constructive change.
a1369209993 5y ago
> none of the three things you mentioned are anywhere close to monopolies. Yes they are. Imagine that I imported alligators to Washington[0] and set up a gumbo resturant in Seattle. I would have a (local) monopoly on alligator meat. The fact that you can easily buy beef or chicken from any number of other places doesn't change this, it just means that my monopoly isn't particularly relevant. Similarly, Facebook has a monopoly on communication with people and groups that communicate exclusively via Facebook. You could go communicate with someone else, just like you could go buy some other kind of meat in the above example, but there is no competitor for communicating with the people you actually (for some reason) want to communicate with. The relevant question is whether Facebook's monopoly is broad enough to be relevant. Reasonable people might disagree about that. But there is no question that they have a monopoly. > their monopoly was so powerful because there was often no other way to get from point A to point B In such a case, the fact that you could instead choose to go to point C by way of some other railroad, does not mean they don't have a monopoly on travel to point B. (Nor does your theoretical ability to walk to point B, or track down a Facebook user in real life and visit their house.) 0: I'm going to assume noone has already done this.
- huitzitziltzin 5y ago
  No, Facebook is not a monopoly. Your gumbo restaurant example gets at part of the issue: you need to describe the market correctly at a bare minimum. Who are the competitors in the market OR, if there are none, why is the market definition you have offered the correct one? This is why the FTC lost their monopolization case against Facebook this January. Instead of offering a market definition, they made vague, hand-waving statements in their complaint which all revolved around it being "obvious" that FB was a monopoly. The judge was not persuaded. ~Antitrust economist.
  - stale2002 5y ago
    > you need to describe the market correctly at a bare minimum The Monopoly is on social networks with the exact same features as Facebook, in literally every way, down to the last detail. Yes, that is a monopoly. The question that actually matters though, is how much substitute goods there are for Facebook. But yes, Facebook absolutely has a Monopoly on the product that is exactly the same as Facebook.
huitzitziltzin 5y ago
Your analysis is correct, but the quality of antitrust commentary on this site is not that high! Neither Google nor Facebook is plausibly a monopoly. This does not mean that they don't occasionally do things which violate antitrust laws! They do. And they should be punished for such violations. But they aren't monopolies. ~Antitrust economist.
- sanderjd 5y ago
  Exactly my take.
munificent 5y ago
I think we need to be clearer by what "product" means when it comes to monopolies in the Information Age. In the Industrial Age, you had a monopoly on paperclips if the only way to buy a paperclips was through your company. But paperclips themselves are commodity-like: there are billions of them out there and each is more or less interchangeable with the others. Information products are not like paperclips. Each piece of information is by definition unique, and its value to the consumer is predicated on that uniqueness. When you buy a picture frame from a store, the first thing you do is throw out the little paper photo that's in it and replace it with yours. Why? The previous image was a picture of a smiling family. Isn't your goal with the product to have a framed photo of a smiling family? Why not just save yourself the trouble and keep the paper? Well, it turns out that the fact that you want a smiling photo of your family is highly salient. Sure, there are lots of social networks. If I want to find an app that has humans on it that I can connect with, there is definitely no monopoly. But if I want to find an app that lets me connect with my actual friends, then my choices are limited to exactly the social networks they actually use. If I want an app that doesn't just let me receive event invitations, but let's me receive the actual invitations my real friends send, I sure as hell better be on that one particular app. That app has an iron-clad complete monopoly on those events. Almost every media or information company has thousands of micro-monopolies on various unique pieces of data. Our simple notion of trusts does not accommodate that concept. We need to update our thinking to the 21st century.
- bcrosby95 5y ago
  I find this argument pretty interesting. It seems like if social networks decide to adapt open protocols, it would pretty much kill it. Which wouldn't be the worst outcome out there.
  - munificent 5y ago
    > It seems like if social networks decide to adapt open protocols, it would pretty much kill it. ...which is exactly why they never will. This is how you know they are behaving monopolistically. An analogous problem exists with media companies. Why do we all now have subscriptions to Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, etc. instead of just one? They don't seem to have a monopoly since there are so many. But we don't seem to have much choice either, since we end up having most of them. The problem is that each has a complete monopoly on certain shows. If you want to watch "Stranger Things", the only way to get it is Netflix.
rapind 5y ago
> none of the three things you mentioned are anywhere close to monopolies Imagine thinking that google doesn’t have a monopoly on search. That Amazon doesn’t have a monopoly on selling goods online, etc. Now these companies do lots of other things that they don’t monopolize, but they ARE monopolies in specific high value spaces and they leverage those monopolies in their other endeavours.
- noslenwerdna 5y ago
  Facebook does not have a monopoly on social networking
  - rapind 5y ago
    I didn’t mention Facebook. I can’t really put my finger on it. They definitely have a lion’s share of a certain type of social networking, but I’m not sure it constitutes a monopoly. Maybe social graph as GP states, but I honestly don’t know enough about it to chime in with an opinion about that.
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bsder 5y ago
> none of the three things you mentioned are anywhere close to monopolies Let me propose a different way to think about it. Can I do task <X> and prevent company <Y> from capturing any value from it? Can I post my own video online and prevent YouTube from capturing any value? The answer is "No." Some jerk will post it to YouTube and a whole bunch of views will go over there and Google will capture ad revenue on it. That's definitely a monopoly.
- sanderjd 5y ago
  This thought experiment has nothing to do with what a monopoly is. See, I think people have been using this term without any actual definition of it for so long that people are actively confused by what is and isn't a monopoly. People have said focusing on this word is "just semantics" but it isn't because people really aren't sure what it means.
opensoc108 5y ago
At minimum big tech (GAFAM) is guilty of Data Trafficking, Illegal Wiretapping and Racketeering. https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/amazon-copied-products-rigged-search-results-promote-its-own-brands-documents-2021-10-13/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/amazon-copied-produ... Every interaction with them is blindfolded deep cavity strip search with average 30 agents(30 cookies) without our permission. Even the EU data compliance pop ups don’t show participants of this heinous data molestation. Forget antitrust, they ought to be tried under racketeering laws or RICCO statues which was used against mafia. Bork and Lina khan doctrine while relevant can’t help us restore the old internet from the current toxic ad littered pages.

hardtke 5y ago

The monopoly is not on the consumer side, it is on the advertising side. Google and Facebook are the only companies that have access to data on basically every sale on the internet (almost every site that uses their ad tools reports back their sales). This data gives them a defensible duopoly on digital advertising.

spaced-out 5y ago
> Google and Facebook are the only companies that have access to data on basically every sale on the internet Amazon? eBay? WeChat?
- hardtke 5y ago
  Sites report their data back to Google analytics and Facebook by implementing their pixels. People don't do this for Amazon, ebay, wechat.
  - sanderjd 5y ago
    Amazon actually does have a quickly growing ads business FWIW.
sanderjd 5y ago
This argument makes way more sense, but it is also not well handled by existing anti-trust law and a much better response would be new regulation. Edit: It also doesn't speak to any of the issues with Amazon. (Also interestingly, Amazon's own advertising business is increasingly making this a tri-opoly.)

mrkurt 5y ago

Antitrust is much broader than "monopolies". It's all about concentrated power. Saying "monopoly" is just shorthand for market power, it's not a binary definition.

sanderjd 5y ago
> Antitrust is much broader than "monopolies". I'm with you here. > Saying "monopoly" is just shorthand for market power, it's not a binary definition. No, the word "monopoly" has an actual definition.
- colinmhayes 5y ago
  You can waste time on semantics or you accept that practically everyone means "company that abuses their overwhelming market power to create friction in the market" when they say monopoly.
  - sanderjd 5y ago
    It isn't semantics. You want to use the word monopoly to mean something different than what it means. Feel free to make the more nuanced point about "abusing market power", but if you're building your argument around the word monopoly, you need to be using that word to mean what it means.
    - colinmhayes 5y ago
      I mean I agree, just pointing out that you're not really convincing anyone here and complaining about this isn't very productive since you, I, and everyone else here understands what is meant.
      - sanderjd 5y ago
        I seriously doubt that's true. I'm sure I'm not convincing any of the people debating me in their own comments, but there are always other people reading the debate, who don't have as strong of preconceptions as the people commenting, and I suspect at least a few such people have thought to themselves "hmmm, yeah, he's right, those don't seem like monopolies". (I'm sure there are people being convinced of the opposite too.) It's a mistake to think the audience for a public discussion is limited to the people commenting. Edit to add: And to the "everyone knows what is meant". No, that's not true, lots of people have become confused by the usage of the word "monopoly" to describe the issues with big tech companies, through its pervasive usage in congressional hearings and media. Using confusing inaccurate language is not harmless, it confuses the debate.

politician 5y ago

When a system has two billion users, then it is the world's largest government. It really doesn't matter if it meets one nation's definition of monopoly. Facebook literally rivals the Catholic Church for participation. Zuck is literally the Pope of his own empire.

alisonkisk 5y ago
Well, not literally, but spiritually.

awillen 5y ago

This right here. I own an e-commerce business, and I sell on Amazon, but I do about 10x the revenue on my own site that I do on Amazon. I'm in no way unique in this regard - for all of the talk of how much Amazon dominates e-commerce, the reality is that it's never been easier to successfully run your own e-commerce site (just look at Shopify's market cap). Sure, if you're selling totally commoditized goods that's a different story, but even there you've got substantial enough web presences from retailers like Walmart and Target that Amazon still can't reasonably be called a monopoly.

mywittyname 5y ago

You're right on the technicals, but the GP is right in spirit. It seems like society needs a term for the concept of a company accumulating far too much power, and that we need laws similar to anti-trust laws, that apply to these companies. This is an incredibly difficult problem to address specifically because FB is not a classic monopoly. I'm not even sure what it would mean to "break them up". Amazon, MS, Apple, and Google are all far easier to split up. Each company has logical seams to split at (i.e., aws/retail, gcp/search/android, itunes/devices, etc). You could split FB and insta, but that doesn't really curb FB's power and influence at all.

SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
Isn't the term just "too powerful"? It seems to me that the reason we don't have laws against companies being too powerful is that most people don't think it's a big deal for companies to be too powerful, as long as they're not monopolies.
- lotsofpulp 5y ago
  If people thought an entity was “too powerful”, then they would want a law against the entity, otherwise the word “too” does not mean anything. The reason there is no law against being “too powerful” is because it is a nebulous description that is not enforceable in a fair manner.
  - SpicyLemonZest 5y ago
    I kinda fundamentally reject the premise here. When I say that a sandwich is "too expensive", I don't mean that there ought to be a law against selling sandwiches for that price.
    - lotsofpulp 5y ago
      The context is dealing with the problem of the existence of a too powerful company. Dealing with a too expensive sandwich requires no laws.

stevetodd 5y ago

Remember that you are the product and not the customer for these companies. Google’s customers are the advertisers who pay and (I’d argue) those who want to show up in search results. You have to either pay for ads or play their algorithm game to be relevant because of their monopoly position on search. It’s basically the same story for Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, etc.

sanderjd 5y ago
But this argument still seems to rely on "monopoly position on search", when there are in fact a number of search engines.
- missedthecue 5y ago
  And additionally, the switching cost for users to change search engines is literally zero. It takes all of 2 seconds and opening a new tab. There are no contract cancellations or negotiating or payment loss. It costs zero dollars and zero time. Google owns a huge portion of search simply because they have the best product.

SkeuomorphicBee 5y ago

> The analogy with the railroads simply is not apt, their monopoly was so powerful because there was often no other way to get from point A to point B, so they had complete leverage. I still believe the analogy holds, just substitute geographical points A and B with person A and person B (or business A to potential client B), and the similarities are obviously clear. There is often no other way to get from person A to person B than to use Facebook, or from person C to D without Twitter, ... . Yes, there are various social networks, but there was also various railway barons. Just like the railway was not a single nationwide monopoly, but instead a series of smaller regional monopolies, a single social network is not an all encompassing internet-wide monopoly, but instead a monopoly lording over a subgroup.

sanderjd 5y ago
There is absolutely other ways to get between those people in all those cases. That's exactly why it doesn't hold.
- monetus 5y ago
  Speaking in absolutes, you absolutely could go door to door and hope to find me, but for say, my class in highschool, FB would be their only reasonable way.
- dane-pgp 5y ago
  You could also walk between point A and point B, but that doesn't mean that rail monopolies aren't a problem.
  - sanderjd 5y ago
    There are other equivalent ways. Using iMessage is not like walking compared to Messenger, it's just parallel railroad tracks.
    - dane-pgp 5y ago
      Dividing your attention between two different messaging apps is more than twice as inconvenient/costly as having just one. If the first company to lay tracks could force later companies to charge double for journeys along their parallel tracks, then that would be a clearly anti-competitive situation. The situation is even worse with messaging apps than with railroads, though, since there is a coordination problem between customers/users of each service, rather than each customer/user being able to make their choice of service in isolation. It's very hard for a messaging service to compete if it requires users to ruin the experience of not just themselves but also at least one of their friends.

HWR_14 5y ago

The question posed by the monopolies is not "are these the only options". But do these wield too much market power to be controlled by the market. That is, sure, Bing and DDG make up 5% of the global search, but is that enough. Yes, people use Twitter and TikTok, but does that replace the social graph of FB? Yes, I can buy directly online from many places, but if people are going to Amazon instead of Google to search for prices does it matter? So, my question to you, if every non-Google search engine published their formula for rankings, and SEO for going up all their rankings was mutually exclusive with going up in Google's rankings, do you believe any site would implement them? I doubt anyone would trade higher status on every other engine for lower status on Google. And in that case, they may as well be a monopoly.

oconnor663 5y ago
I don't know what the formal definitions of any of these things are, but I assume (hope?) that it's important not to equate being successful with being a monopoly by definition. If Ford came out with an amazing new car tomorrow, and suddenly 95% of new cars purchased were Fords, we probably shouldn't initiate trust-busting action against Ford on that basis alone. We want car companies to try to capture market share by making better cars. I don't know exactly how we contend with this definitional problem, but intuitively I think it should have something to do with prices and behavior. For example, if we were a fly on the wall in a Google exec meeting, we might be curious about whether they're jacking up the price of ads because they know no one can compete with them, or whether they're sensitive to charging more than their smaller competitors do. If they're behaving like their competitors are a serious threat, then intuitively they're probably not a monopoly, and it probably doesn't make sense to trust-bust them. But anyway I'm not a lawyer, and I don't know what the current thinking is about any of this stuff.
- tablespoon 5y ago
  > I don't know what the formal definitions of any of these things are, but I assume (hope?) that it's important not to equate being successful with being a monopoly by definition. If Ford came out with an amazing new car tomorrow, and suddenly 95% of new cars purchased were Fords, we probably shouldn't initiate trust-busting action against Ford on that basis alone. We want car companies to try to capture market share by making better cars. There's an important difference between "capturing market share" and "capturing too much the market share." If Ford's going to put its competitors out of business, turn them into niche players, or even just get into a position where it can rest on its laurels for a few decades, our primary concern is no longer making sure Ford can be rewarded. Honestly, I don't see the downside of regularly breaking up a #1 player with too much market share into successors that are the #2 and #3 payers (and forcing major shareholders to divest one or the other). I want companies to be competing to get to the top, but once they get there, give them a prize for their effort and send them back down. From my experience as a customer, Amazon's e-commerce operation hasn't improved much (e.g. their search is still as shitty as ever) and has arguably regressed in many ways (e.g. more shady products and fake reviews) in the last decade. That's pretty strong signal to me that they're not under enough competitive pressure.

ncallaway 5y ago

> none of the three things you mentioned are anywhere close to monopolies. I think it depends on what you consider "the market" to be. If I want to compare Amazon to the "Global Retail Market" (Amazon's preferred framing), then maybe they aren't in a monopolistic position. But I—as ab individual—don't participate in the Global Retail Market. I participate in the "online US retail" and "Pacific Northwest retail" market. So I don't get much benefit out of there being more competition to Amazon in France, so the "Global Retail Market" doesn't seem like it's always the right framing. For me, it's still the case that Amazon doesn't feel like a monopoly, but I could imagine areas where Amazon is much closer to being one of just a small number of options for many products. Similarly, I'm sure Facebook wants to be evaluated against _all_ communication media, but again I want to communicate with people in my immediate network. If 100% of my social network and business contacts used exclusively Facebook for communication, then from _my_ perspective Facebook might have a monopoly on my communication options (even if they have real competition in China from competitors). I'm not so convinced that we should just accept the broadest possible interpretation of "the market" that we should evaluate as the correct framing. From the perspective of some individuals, if there is only a single dominant option, then that person still needs to deal with anti-trust issues. It's similar to the way some of the major internet players will carve up the country into regions of fairly exclusive offerings. Across US broadband, the market may be divided amongst a number of different players such that it doesn't appear to be a monopoly. But when you zoom in to an individual municipality, it might be that there _is_ a monopoly at that level, and the competition that appears to exist in the "national market" is actual a union of separate monopolies (and other regions where there is actual competition). So, while I totally agree with you that under the legal definitions of monopolies, many of these entities are not there, under individuals _practical_ definition of monopolies, many of these entities _are_ monopolistic.

sanderjd 5y ago
> I think it depends on what you consider "the market" to be. It honestly doesn't. None of these are monopolies by any market definition. Amazon has so many competitors: brick and mortar stores like Walmart and Target and Best Buy remain successful, online competitors again like Walmart and Target and Best Buy but also Ebay and in a different way Shopify and others, are also successful. Your argument is slightly stronger in the case of Facebook, but still very weak. Facebook's social networks have strong direct competition in Twitter and TikTok. Facebook's communication platforms have strong competitors in iMessage, SMS apps, Signal, Telegram, Discord, etc. I'm not 'accept[ing] the broadest possible interpretation of "the market"', I'm just not accepting hand-wavy non-definitions of "market" that only include a single company so that it can be called a monopoly by definition. Again, I think there are major problems and I favor new regulations for all of those problems. But what I don't think makes sense at all is redefining "monopoly" in a way that makes no sense, just because anti-trust law is our only extant tool for solving the problems caused by enormous tech firms.

supercanuck 5y ago

They most certainly are monopolies and we can see it in their behavior. What America is figuring out that, if the US Markets are going to remain uncompetitive, than Chinese companies that don't play by the same rules are going to outcompete these lethargic companies that don't want to get better but instead vacuum up all their competitors. This hurts American's technology advantage and competitiveness in the global marketplace. >Again, according to the complaint, Facebook chose to buy an emerging threat rather than compete, and announced an agreement in February 2014 to acquire WhatsApp for $19 billion. >The complaint also alleges that Facebook, over many years, has imposed anticompetitive conditions on third-party software developers’ access to valuable interconnections to its platform, such as the application programming interfaces (“APIs”) that allow the developers’ apps to interface with Facebook. In particular, Facebook allegedly has made key APIs available to third-party applications only on the condition that they refrain from developing competing functionalities, and from connecting with or promoting other social networking services. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2020/12/ftc-sues-facebook-illegal-monopolization https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2020/12/ftc-s...

sanderjd 5y ago
> They most certainly are monopolies and we can see it in their behavior. This is not true for all the reasons I already pointed out in my comment. You can't just wish this away. You need some other theory of the case. I agree with you that all those things are bad, but those bad things just don't flow from monopoly, they flow from some other problem.
- supercanuck 5y ago
  Take it up with the FTC and Tim Wu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Wu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Wu) then, you obviously are more in the know than they are.
  - sanderjd 5y ago
    The FTC is free to make the arguments you and others are making here. I would bet you large sums of money that those arguments will not prevail. In fact I'm quite sure they won't bring cases using those arguments because they know that and don't want to be embarrassed. They will probably bring different arguments and also lobby for other regulatory changes, and I'm all for all of that, but they won't come to court saying "Amazon has a monopoly on e-commerce", because lawyers don't like it when judges laugh at them.

throwaway894345 5y ago

The obvious problem with considering social network platforms as interchangeable competitors is that they... aren't interchangeable at all. A user can't pack up and go to a different platform because their actual social network (i.e., relationships between humans) is only accessible on one platform. For example, my colleagues are on Twitter but not Mastodon. I can't leave Twitter without leaving my social network. Why does Twitter own access to my colleagues? Why should we allow that to be a competitive advantage? It's certainly at-odds with the principle of innovation--you're not on a platform because it's more innovative than another platform, you're on it because they have a monopoly on your social network. Contrary to your claim, there's very little competition in these markets because corporate ownership of user social networks is an enormous moat. Not only can users not easily move to another platform, but advertisers can't easily spend their money on some new platform because the new platform is much smaller in all likelihood.

mikkergp 5y ago
The 'my colleagues are on twitter by not mastodon' example doesn't feel salient to me. The best example would probably be MMORPG's. Should people who play WoW have access to people who play FFIV? I guess the question would be is social networking more a communications utility like a cell phone or e-mail, or is it more of a recreational activity. Personally I've never felt like not being on facebook took access away from my friends the way not having a phone would. Oddly no one talks about LinkedIn being a monopoly which feels like a more substantive example, since not being on LinkedIn may impact job opportunities. But not being on facebook, instagram, or twitter feels more like I won't be able to recreate with my friends/family and less like I won't be able to communicate with them.
- throwaway894345 5y ago
  I think the MMORPG example is off for a few reasons: 1. The primary product of an MMORPG isn’t access to a social network. 2. The social networks in these games is far smaller than social media platforms (we don’t usually worry about anti-trust for tiny markets) 3. As you mentioned, social media platforms are communications/infrastructure, not recreation.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

The railroads weren't total monopolies, they were just local monopolies. If you didn't like them you could just move somewhere else, to another place with a local monopoly. Which is not the same as competition.

NoGravitas 5y ago
Sounds like the current situation with broadband ISPs.

bmitc 5y ago

I made a comment recently addressing these very things. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28851867 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28851867 My contention summarized is that using market share as it has historically been used is not good, because these software-based companies can scale to much greater power than ever before whereas in the past, one had to gain significant market share to wield the same or even less power.

dahfizz 5y ago
I think you and OP agree. Tech giants are clearly "too powerful" and need to be dealt with, but the traditional formulation of monopoly power is not a good way to deal with these tech giants.
- sanderjd 5y ago
  Yep! We do agree. I wouldn't have commented if people were saying "these companies have too much power" because I agree. But they aren't monopolies.

joe_the_user 5y ago

But I also think there are major issues with the current configuration of the tech industry! They just aren't because of monopolies. It is not helpful to misdiagnose a real problem. It is not helpful to have only a hammer and call every problem a nail. Yeah, the situation involves a contradictory litany of complaints. Google/Facebook/etc are terrible because they suppress free speech and terrible because they allow it. They're terrible because monopolize online advertising and terrible because they facilitate it. The purpose of breaking up a monopoly is to allow competition to facilitate the provisioning of whatever good a monopoly provides. Lots of people imagine breaking up or regulating Facebook will prevent the variety of abuses that we see. But if you look at the "competitive Internet", you can observe a sea of garbage in the form of endless popups, malware and eCommerce fraud. Things seem little more thought-out than "I want this to stop", which is hardly a recipe for constructive change.

a1369209993 5y ago

> none of the three things you mentioned are anywhere close to monopolies. Yes they are. Imagine that I imported alligators to Washington[0] and set up a gumbo resturant in Seattle. I would have a (local) monopoly on alligator meat. The fact that you can easily buy beef or chicken from any number of other places doesn't change this, it just means that my monopoly isn't particularly relevant. Similarly, Facebook has a monopoly on communication with people and groups that communicate exclusively via Facebook. You could go communicate with someone else, just like you could go buy some other kind of meat in the above example, but there is no competitor for communicating with the people you actually (for some reason) want to communicate with. The relevant question is whether Facebook's monopoly is broad enough to be relevant. Reasonable people might disagree about that. But there is no question that they have a monopoly. > their monopoly was so powerful because there was often no other way to get from point A to point B In such a case, the fact that you could instead choose to go to point C by way of some other railroad, does not mean they don't have a monopoly on travel to point B. (Nor does your theoretical ability to walk to point B, or track down a Facebook user in real life and visit their house.) 0: I'm going to assume noone has already done this.

huitzitziltzin 5y ago
No, Facebook is not a monopoly. Your gumbo restaurant example gets at part of the issue: you need to describe the market correctly at a bare minimum. Who are the competitors in the market OR, if there are none, why is the market definition you have offered the correct one? This is why the FTC lost their monopolization case against Facebook this January. Instead of offering a market definition, they made vague, hand-waving statements in their complaint which all revolved around it being "obvious" that FB was a monopoly. The judge was not persuaded. ~Antitrust economist.
- stale2002 5y ago
  > you need to describe the market correctly at a bare minimum The Monopoly is on social networks with the exact same features as Facebook, in literally every way, down to the last detail. Yes, that is a monopoly. The question that actually matters though, is how much substitute goods there are for Facebook. But yes, Facebook absolutely has a Monopoly on the product that is exactly the same as Facebook.

huitzitziltzin 5y ago

Your analysis is correct, but the quality of antitrust commentary on this site is not that high! Neither Google nor Facebook is plausibly a monopoly. This does not mean that they don't occasionally do things which violate antitrust laws! They do. And they should be punished for such violations. But they aren't monopolies. ~Antitrust economist.

sanderjd 5y ago
Exactly my take.

munificent 5y ago

I think we need to be clearer by what "product" means when it comes to monopolies in the Information Age. In the Industrial Age, you had a monopoly on paperclips if the only way to buy a paperclips was through your company. But paperclips themselves are commodity-like: there are billions of them out there and each is more or less interchangeable with the others. Information products are not like paperclips. Each piece of information is by definition unique, and its value to the consumer is predicated on that uniqueness. When you buy a picture frame from a store, the first thing you do is throw out the little paper photo that's in it and replace it with yours. Why? The previous image was a picture of a smiling family. Isn't your goal with the product to have a framed photo of a smiling family? Why not just save yourself the trouble and keep the paper? Well, it turns out that the fact that you want a smiling photo of your family is highly salient. Sure, there are lots of social networks. If I want to find an app that has humans on it that I can connect with, there is definitely no monopoly. But if I want to find an app that lets me connect with my actual friends, then my choices are limited to exactly the social networks they actually use. If I want an app that doesn't just let me receive event invitations, but let's me receive the actual invitations my real friends send, I sure as hell better be on that one particular app. That app has an iron-clad complete monopoly on those events. Almost every media or information company has thousands of micro-monopolies on various unique pieces of data. Our simple notion of trusts does not accommodate that concept. We need to update our thinking to the 21st century.

bcrosby95 5y ago
I find this argument pretty interesting. It seems like if social networks decide to adapt open protocols, it would pretty much kill it. Which wouldn't be the worst outcome out there.
- munificent 5y ago
  > It seems like if social networks decide to adapt open protocols, it would pretty much kill it. ...which is exactly why they never will. This is how you know they are behaving monopolistically. An analogous problem exists with media companies. Why do we all now have subscriptions to Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, etc. instead of just one? They don't seem to have a monopoly since there are so many. But we don't seem to have much choice either, since we end up having most of them. The problem is that each has a complete monopoly on certain shows. If you want to watch "Stranger Things", the only way to get it is Netflix.

rapind 5y ago

> none of the three things you mentioned are anywhere close to monopolies Imagine thinking that google doesn’t have a monopoly on search. That Amazon doesn’t have a monopoly on selling goods online, etc. Now these companies do lots of other things that they don’t monopolize, but they ARE monopolies in specific high value spaces and they leverage those monopolies in their other endeavours.

noslenwerdna 5y ago
Facebook does not have a monopoly on social networking
- rapind 5y ago
  I didn’t mention Facebook. I can’t really put my finger on it. They definitely have a lion’s share of a certain type of social networking, but I’m not sure it constitutes a monopoly. Maybe social graph as GP states, but I honestly don’t know enough about it to chime in with an opinion about that.
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bsder 5y ago

> none of the three things you mentioned are anywhere close to monopolies Let me propose a different way to think about it. Can I do task <X> and prevent company <Y> from capturing any value from it? Can I post my own video online and prevent YouTube from capturing any value? The answer is "No." Some jerk will post it to YouTube and a whole bunch of views will go over there and Google will capture ad revenue on it. That's definitely a monopoly.

sanderjd 5y ago
This thought experiment has nothing to do with what a monopoly is. See, I think people have been using this term without any actual definition of it for so long that people are actively confused by what is and isn't a monopoly. People have said focusing on this word is "just semantics" but it isn't because people really aren't sure what it means.

opensoc108 5y ago

At minimum big tech (GAFAM) is guilty of Data Trafficking, Illegal Wiretapping and Racketeering. https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/amazon-copied-products-rigged-search-results-promote-its-own-brands-documents-2021-10-13/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/amazon-copied-produ... Every interaction with them is blindfolded deep cavity strip search with average 30 agents(30 cookies) without our permission. Even the EU data compliance pop ups don’t show participants of this heinous data molestation. Forget antitrust, they ought to be tried under racketeering laws or RICCO statues which was used against mafia. Bork and Lina khan doctrine while relevant can’t help us restore the old internet from the current toxic ad littered pages.