[lunaru]

We need to start expanding the scope of our anti-trust laws so that internet communication channels go back to what they were meant to be: de-centralized.

The fact that the internet and web was designed to be decentralized and then somehow ended up being concentrated on 5 or 6 websites is a bug, not a feature.

I'm not proposing we just do this overnight though -- too much of the US economy and software sector is propped up by these companies to just yank it all out, but we need to head back to decentralization by revisiting our definition of monopolies as it applies to communication channels.

[hagy]

I don't believe the dominance of a small number of social media empires is due to anti-trust violations, specifically anit-competitive behavior. Instead, I believe these industries have incredibly strong network effects with the value of the platform growing faster than linear with the number of members.

If there were thousands of social media networks, each of roughly the same size, then content would be highly fragmented. If say your closest ten friends and family members in aggregate use seven different networks, then you'd have to belong to all seven and regularly interact with all seven to stay up to date with your community. A similar situation exists for following famous and influential people.

Further, as any single social network grows, it naturally acquires a moat in that with more members there is a larger reason for new members to join that network since there is a higher percentage of people of interest already on the social network in question. Over time we've seen this lead to dominant social networks over several generations of social media. E.g., Friendster -> MySpace -> Facebook.