Facebook may not be a monopoly, but on the other hand, that's not a necessary condition for antitrust laws to kick in. A dominant position on the market is enough.
Luckily, there are laws against monopolies. I don't see what you mean by Facebook currently having a monopoly, because Facebook is not the only social network.
Given the fact one of their main competitors is Valve, I don't think you have to worry about them destroying their competition financially either. Facebook isn't even really competing with them, FB is going for the low end market.
A non story. Facebook is doing what Facebook ought to be doing. Monopoly is not a bad thing when no one’s rights are being violated. The next innovation will come from someplace other than social media.
It's much better to argue that FB is a monopoly than a natural monopoly. It's not at all obvious why FB cannot instantly die like all social media companies before. I'm not sure what inspiration is hoped by linking to Wikipedia on a fiercely discussed issue.
With the key bit of analysis being (from the latter):
> Facebook, for its part, had, for better or worse, transitioned to a public app that not only handled symmetric relationships, but, at least according to perception, asymmetric broadcast as well; that, though, left an opening for an app like Snapchat. Thus Facebook’s acquisition drive: the company had already secured Instagram, giving it a position in asymmetric ephemeral broadcast apps; Snapchat rebuffed advances, so the company soon moved on to WhatsApp.
> The importance of these two acquisitions cannot be overstated: Facebook has always been secure in its dominance of permanent social relationships, a position that has given the company a dominant position in digital advertising. However, while everyone may need a permanent place on the Internet (all of those teenagers people say Facebook needs to reach have Facebook accounts), the ultimate currency is attention, and much like real life, it is ephemeral conversation that dominates. Facebook, by virtue of early decisions around privacy and significant bad press about the dangers of revealing too much, was locked out of this sphere, so it bought in.
So if we segment the markets along the lines that consumers tend to intuitively percieve, FB has monopoly over public symmetric (personal) social networking. That seems like a coherent market segment definition to me. Though of course that's a lot of qualifiers so I could easily see someone objecting that they are arbitrary/post-hoc.
As a separate point, perhaps someone with legal expertise can comment on this one - I'm curious why the FTC's complaint relied on establishing a monopoly; the Sherman Act doesn't actually require establishing a monopoly; anticompetitive conduct that attempts to establish a harmful monopoly is also illegal (e.g. see https://www.justice.gov/atr/competition-and-monopoly-single-...). It seems obvious to me that FB's acquisitions were primarily intended to acquire a monopoly (if they didn't already have one), indeed Zuckerberg explicitly stated that he was trying to prevent a competitor from emerging in the emails that were in these court cases.
Well, to be fair, there are digital product marketplaces that are still essentially monopolies (DriveThru, Kindle). I doubt Facebook is going to take over those markets any time soon.
If they were viable competitors like Instagram, Whatsapp or even Snapchat, FB would try to buy them out and become monopoly-like again. But there is no perception that the gov should question these mergers for this industry.
It's also a good reminder that monopolies in the tech industry are fleeting. The concerns that people have today over Facebook becoming a monopoly will seem a bit silly in 20 years after they miss a disruptive change and lose out to a new competitor.
Hypothetically, Facebook has a monopoly in social networking, but then they decide to launch a roblox clone tomorrow. Since they have a new product line where they don’t have a monopoly, we should look the other way? It’s true that Facebook exists in many spaces where they are not dominant but that does not diminish their dominance - in fact it’s their platform dominance that makes them so dangerous to smaller companies in other spaces.
I don't think Facebook has a monopoly on eye-ball shares in particular. They might have monopoly on social networking as such but given they're not the only thing a person will see in a day by a long-shot, I can't see how they're being more anti-competitive than a TV network (which also has a large but limited share of views).
Lots of monopolies suck at their core business - because they've lost the need to compete due to either suffocating the competition or growing into adjacent markets to lock down their user base. Facebook can both be incompetent and an economic danger.
I think the point is that just because there is an dominant player in an industry, doesn't mean they will remain dominant. How easy it is to disrupt a market varies, but they all will change over time.
Facebook's open graph actually makes it much more likely there will be parallel networks to Facebook that could eventually become primary.
For instance, if Google had Facebook Connect as a login method, they could quickly assemble the entire social graph and potentially beat Facebook.
That's likely why Facebook is in a tiff with Ping - Apple has the capability of replacing Facebook some day.
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