4 ms·

people will accept [paying with their data to access a free service] because monopoly status is a form of power equivalent to that of government Sort of agreed

people will accept [paying with their data to access a free service] because monopoly status is a form of power equivalent to that of government Sort of agreed, but monopoly status is the status of having no meaningful competition, which company/service does this apply to? The other problem is that ~nobody can articulate a way that this "data for access" arrangement has actually harmed, or even so much as inconvenienced them.

kmeisthax 3y ago
It's a very specific and weird kind of monopoly enabled not by being the only meaningful competitor but by being the trusted intermediary everyone else uses. As the operator of a centralized communication network the monopoly is on your ability to contact friends who choose to use their services. In other words, the network effect. While you and your friends can use other services, that still requires you all agree on not just leaving one service, but moving to another service. This might sound like a contrived example, but a significant portion of my extended family uses Facebook and only Facebook to communicate as a group. Since I have zero desire to see any more of my data fly up Mark Zuckerberg's asshole, I very rarely use Facebook, and as a result I am practically dead to a good chunk of my extended family. If I do want to contact them, it is on Mark's terms: I must use his client software, which contains as much spyware as Apple and Google will allow. There is no negotiation, just a choice between capitulation or detachment. The reason why I consider this to be a monopoly is the same reason why I consider, say, Comcast or the United States government to be monopolies. Technically speaking, there are alternatives to cable companies and your national government, but to access them, you need to move, subject yourself to immigration formalities, etc. Messaging apps work the same way. Look at how many people are continuing to stay on Twitter despite Elon Musk radically changing the functionality and political editorialization of the site to be complete garbage. Even mechanically identical services like Threads, Bluesky, or Mastodon have yet to eclipse it because there is no interoperability between them and Twitter[0]. [0] FWIW literally every Mastodon instance I federate with already blocks Threads despite federation merely being a planned feature that doesn't even exist yet. The reasoning behind that is... complicated.

kmeisthax 3y ago

It's a very specific and weird kind of monopoly enabled not by being the only meaningful competitor but by being the trusted intermediary everyone else uses. As the operator of a centralized communication network the monopoly is on your ability to contact friends who choose to use their services. In other words, the network effect. While you and your friends can use other services, that still requires you all agree on not just leaving one service, but moving to another service. This might sound like a contrived example, but a significant portion of my extended family uses Facebook and only Facebook to communicate as a group. Since I have zero desire to see any more of my data fly up Mark Zuckerberg's asshole, I very rarely use Facebook, and as a result I am practically dead to a good chunk of my extended family. If I do want to contact them, it is on Mark's terms: I must use his client software, which contains as much spyware as Apple and Google will allow. There is no negotiation, just a choice between capitulation or detachment. The reason why I consider this to be a monopoly is the same reason why I consider, say, Comcast or the United States government to be monopolies. Technically speaking, there are alternatives to cable companies and your national government, but to access them, you need to move, subject yourself to immigration formalities, etc. Messaging apps work the same way. Look at how many people are continuing to stay on Twitter despite Elon Musk radically changing the functionality and political editorialization of the site to be complete garbage. Even mechanically identical services like Threads, Bluesky, or Mastodon have yet to eclipse it because there is no interoperability between them and Twitter[0]. [0] FWIW literally every Mastodon instance I federate with already blocks Threads despite federation merely being a planned feature that doesn't even exist yet. The reasoning behind that is... complicated.