> Platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter are basically monopolies
Monopolies of what, exactly? I admit to sometimes looking at entertaining videos on youtube. About an hour or maximum two hours a week worth. I'm not sure what you're suggesting that facebook and twitter are monopolizing. I haven't used the former in years and the latter just about ever -- aside from maybe five tweets over the course of twitter's existence.
Monopolies of online discourse? Attention? Entertainment? Clearly we're not using any of those platforms now.
Monopoly on platform reach. The reach of facebook, or the reach of youtube, twitter etc, is so high, that if you want to disseminate a message, those _must_ be the platforms you use. It's as if they own the radio spectrum, and you have to acquiesce to what they demand to use said spectrum.
Of course, i am free to use smoke signals to send my message, but who will receive it?
> If you can use facebook, youtube or twitter to reach lots of people, how could any one of them be a monopoly on reach?
Even though they are competing for attention, they each use different mediums. As an analogy, it's like only having one radio station, one TV station, and one magazine. There needs to be dozens of each for there to be a true marketplace of ideas.
This isn't what the previous poster said - reach is something you can get on any of these platforms (and more), yet that was pointed out as what each has a monopoly on.
Can you define a market each of them has a monopoly over? There are many popular video apps and many popular social media apps. Exactly what does each of them have a monopoly on? A network effect is not a monopoly. Being the exclusive provider of convenience for some specific group of people is not a monopoly.
For example, in some religious town, it's possible that the only way to reach a certain group of people on a Sunday afternoon is to go to the church. This does not mean the church has a monopoly on reach. Likewise, it's possible that where you live, the only place you can get a meal at 2AM is Aunt Ann's Diner. This doesn't make them a monopoly. Nor is the only sushi restaurant in town a monopoly. We live in a world of differentiation - every service provider that has a reason to exist provides something that others don't. This doesn't make everyone a monopoly.
Also, on none of these platforms is it trivial to build a large audience. And it's certainly possible to build a large audience through other means. For any given platform to have a monopoly on reach, people must be spending so little time outside of this platform that it's impossible to reach them otherwise. That's not a world any of us lives in. Even Youtube accounts for a very small fraction of time spent on watching videos and Facebook and Twitter are two of a large number of popular social networks. Snapchat, WeChat, iMessage, Weibo, TikTok, QQ, VK, Reddit, LinkedIn and Line to name a few.
There are many many video content hosting sites, there are countless twitter clones, and there are a crazy amount of sites doing things like Facebook with profiles and such. Because people are choosing to use mainly those doesn’t stop anyone from using others. This isn’t like a utility or phone company where people literally had no alternatives. No one is stopping any of us from connecting to Mastodon for example and even better, no one is stopping us from setting up our own Mastodon servers and connecting that very server up to the wider Mastodon network... There is no Monopoly here.
Because more people choose to eat McDonalds burgers than the local dive bar burgers, does this mean McDonalds has a monopoly on burgers?
My local dive bar can serve me burgers whether it has a customer base of 1.000 or 1.000.000. A social network, however, cannot function without hundreds of millions of users. Otherwise it's an anti-social network.
As a result I can post my video to DailyMotion instead of YouTube but how am I going to build a following without engaging with Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter?
These networks require mass user engagement to be effective which precludes a myriad of competition. I don't think breaking these companies up as Elizabeth Warren suggested is the correct solution because it fundamentally handicaps their ability to function. But I think there does need to be regulation around how they do business which sadly does not exist.
> There are many many video content hosting sites, there are countless twitter clones, and there are a crazy amount of sites doing things like Facebook with profiles and such.
I think the point is yes there are alternatives however given the size/reach of FB, YT, and twitter even those alternatives really aren't competing with them. They own the market share for what do and even many of those alternatives (ie mastodon) post on twitter or FB news or service updates. I'd say the alternatives don't even make up 5% use over FB, YT, or twitter.
Is it a monopoly in the normal sense of the word probably not, but the issue remains that alternatives are niche and truly don't directly compete. I think though as things like people being banned, creators being demonetized or the numerous other things that have happened in the last year to show users of these platforms the problems; we might see these alternatives pick up ground as these people with followings and clout get kicked off or decide to find alternatives. They get too big for their own good and in the process they will end up fragmenting their communities causing some to take alternatives serious.
The claim is that Fb is most definitely not a monopoly on access to political speech. People are not stuck in an information vacuum the moment Facebook bans their favorite content. People who want to access Alex Jones can still do so easily.
What Facebook IS a monopoly of is getting your content to go viral. I argue this service is not speech. Which is why I oppose web hosts and cloudflare censoring content, but support social networks banning users. When web hosts do it, users who WANT that content can't get it anymore. When social networks ban people, they merely can't find new eyeballs that never specifically requested that content.
>The reach of facebook, or the reach of youtube, twitter etc, is so high, that if you want to disseminate a message, those _must_ be the platforms you use.
This isn't true though. Alex Jones can disseminate his message through countless other websites, which have their own users. This is really just advocating for equal exposure of opinions, which isn't a free speech issue.
it's not equal exposure at all, it's equal opportunity for exposure.
i can post a comment on FB and get 0 likes, that doesn't give me equal exposure to the latest nike video on their page.
denying opportunity for exposure is giving that platform the ultimate authority on what shouldn't be able to be exposed in society, if society is reliant on that platform.
i don't want alex jones to have exposure, but i don't want an exec deciding what's next on the chopping block. a page suggesting publicly available employee salaries? they shouldn't have that power
Society in the United States is in no way reliant on that platform. If it were, then we would be in agreement.
If we're talking about internet providers, that's a different issue, since they are a user's conduit to the entire web. Those absolutely should not be able to choose which accounts to favor.
There are plenty of places on the internet more lenient than the biggest websites. Check out voat and see what happens when people banned from other platforms go to the same place. It isn't pretty but at least they aren't a blight on other groups.
So if I wanted to play basketball professionally in the US then the NBA should be obligated to hire me because no other basketball platform has the reach they do?
I'm not fully thought out on this, but I think a decent starting analogy would be to a public square or space in a city. These companies hold a monopoly on the online equivalent of that because of the way network effects work.
USENET was the equivalent of a public square on the Internet. It was overwhelmed by spam.
These networks have been curated from the get-go, for no reason other than to control spam. Then, to keep people hooked, they emphasized virality and controversy. These aspects make them quite unlike a town square.
> USENET was the equivalent of a public square on the Internet. It was overwhelmed by spam.
Our situation is even better than this, the entire internet is our town square, anyone can spin our own metaphorical soap box online and say whatever we want, and the entire worlds internet connected public can hear us if they choose to do so.
In someway these social networks amplify voices by their sharing and recommending and suggesting based on what users do, a normal city square doesn't amplify your voice.
So this is different from walking past a demonstration or assembly in the city, it is more of an Inception movie-like warping of the entire city to bring everyone closer to these peoples voices.
> these social networks amplify voices by their sharing and recommending and suggesting based on what users do, a normal city square doesn't amplify your voice.
Actually, a city square does exactly that, amplify your voice to all those that pass. The difference is that there are many city squares to stand in, whereas there are only a handful of social media companies. The problem here is Facebook's monopoly power, not the medium of communication.
> The difference is that there are many city squares to stand in, whereas there are only a handful of social media companies
I’m just not sure this holds up to any kind of scrutiny. There are tens if not hundreds of thousands of forums online where people can speak.
It’s a problematic analogy anyway, Facebook is not a public space, if we’re going insist on applying a real world physical analogue, they would be much closer to a city’s incredibly popular nightclub with a stage, which of course would never be required to give extremists or provocateurs free-reign of their equipment or stage. But even this analogy has problems.
I think the real argument is whether or not a company is free to associate its brand with whatever it likes.
I. Where the monopolist lies not the exclusive power of production but only certain exclusive facilities as a producer, and can increase, with imdimimished or even increased facility, the amount of his produce....
II. A second kind of monopoly is in the opposite extreme. It exists where price is checked neither by the hopes nor by the fears of the producer, where no competition is dreaded, and no increased supply can be effected. The owners of some vinyards have such a monopoly....
III. A third and more frequent kind of monopoly lies between these two extremes, and is neither so strict as the last, nor so comparatively open as the first. This comprises those cases in which the monopolist is the only producer, but, by the application of additional labow and abstinence, can indefinitely increase his production. The book trade affords an illustration....
IV. The fourth and last class of monopolies exists where production must be assisted by natural agents, limited in number, and varying in power, and repaying with less and less relative assistance every increase in the amount of the labour and abstinence bestowed on them.
-- Nassau William Senior, An Outline Of The Science Of Political Economy, (1836, 1872) pp. 103-106.
Monopolies of what, exactly? I admit to sometimes looking at entertaining videos on youtube. About an hour or maximum two hours a week worth. I'm not sure what you're suggesting that facebook and twitter are monopolizing. I haven't used the former in years and the latter just about ever -- aside from maybe five tweets over the course of twitter's existence.
Monopolies of online discourse? Attention? Entertainment? Clearly we're not using any of those platforms now.