[foobar2021]

some people’s news choices begin and end on Facebook. Does that mean Facebook would have a monopoly on news if it that market shared increased enough? What’s stopping people from just typing in a non Amazon.com address into their browser?

I get maybe for the older population but that’d put a 10-20 year cap on Amazon dominance before the majority of their customer base understands the internet enough to look for alternatives if amazons service isn’t good enough.

[Woden501]

You ask that about Facebook and thanks to the recent outage we can already see that YES Facebook is having a significant impact on traffic to non-Facebook news sites. When Facebook went down earlier this month there was a 40% spike in traffic to news sites during the outage.

Now imagine a company that has been just as effective as Facebook at replacing/consuming/killing it's competition in the retail space and you've got Amazon. If Amazon went down for a proportional extended period, say for a few days, you'd likely see a massive spike in sales at other retailers just as we saw a massive spike in new site traffic when Facebook was down.