Late reply here, but yeah! Monopoly is when you have all of something that people want and they can't get it anywhere else right? The popular social networks ar

Late reply here, but yeah! Monopoly is when you have all of something that people want and they can't get it anywhere else right? The popular social networks are monopolies even if you technically could start your own Instagram; you're just exceedingly unlikely to re-create the value you get from using the one that exists with all the users. The network is the value and it's monopolized. iMessage is like Instagram. It's a network, and it matters. I'm speaking as someone who switched from Android to iOS recently in large part _for_ access to iMessage. You can't build an iOS competitor and overcome the network effect of people wanting to use iMessage, even if your OS is superior in other ways. People have to choose between lesser of two evils instead of benefitting from the best-of-all-worlds. This is inherently anticompetitive -- the main reason monopolies are bad.