More Facebook News Shitshow Thoughts

[jilder]

 From The Conversation: One of these things is not like the others: why Facebook is beyond our control

"Although a relatively new concept in economics, the idea of a network effect dates back to at least 1908 when the president of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, Theodore Vail, spelled it out in a letter to stockholders.

“A telephone, without a connection at the other end of the line, is not even a toy or a scientific instrument,” he wrote. “It is one of the most useless things in the world. Its value depends on the connection with the other telephone — and increases with the number of connections.”

...

The world’s first telephone was indeed useless, the second allowed one household to reach only one other. But by the time there were millions, and almost every household had one, each telephone became incredibly valuable, allowing that household to reach almost every other household.

A startup that tried to compete with the phone system would be offering a very unappealing product. It wouldn’t be able to offer anything like the connections of the existing system until a huge proportion of the population signed up, meaning people would be reluctant to sign up, meaning it would stay unappealing.

Which is the point Vail was making. When it gets big enough, the telephone service is something close to a natural monopoly. There’s no point in anyone setting up a competing one (and in Australia we haven’t — the competing companies, Telstra, Optus and so on, share the one network)."

This is a good outline about the enduring difficulty of moving off Facebook - and a good case to nationalize it:
 

Also from The Conversation: Why not nationalize Facebook?

"For many people, Facebook has become a personal, professional and economic necessity: “Your business could have trouble reaching customers; your family might not gather on another social network; no one posts any events anywhere else.” For many users in poorer countries with bad internet connectivity, “Facebook is, in a sense, the whole internet,” Glaser writes.

These analysts call for, at a minimum, strong regulation of a problematic monopoly, but it’s not hard to push their argument even farther.

A chronically problematic organization whose demise would throw society into chaos is clearly not a normal business. Facebook, in short, has become a critical part of our infrastructure, and we should treat it as such."

Comments

[bunnitos]

Yes, this reinforces my thoughts on it. Everyone is there so it's almost impossible to compete with. Though if you look at it this way, the phone system overtook (though didn't entirely replace the post/telegraph systems), the internet as the next step, facebook and then... ? So maybe there's something else to supplant it, but that's still a monopoly (unless as examined here there are competing service providers like telcos).