First, social media companies are very similar. The serve the same rough purpose, that of communicating with large amounts of others, and are exploited to deal with others. The means by which this happen are immaterial.
Stuff and nonsense. A 15 second Tiktok video is hardly the same as a 144 character tweet or a Facebook timeline.
Second, yes, freight trains and container ships are competitors. A monopoly would occur if, for example, someone owned all railroads between two cities where there wasn't a port or river connection, but having a monopoly on railroads between New Orleans and Chicago isn't worth much because of the Mississippi.
Other examples of competitors that do similar things in different ways: Amazon Fresh and grocery stores. Both provide food, but differ in how they do it. Also competitors: Record Stores and the Itunes Store, as well as music radio stations and Spotify. Both sets provide access to music, just in different ways.
But Tiktok, Facebook, and Twitter
don't provide access to the same thing. One provides snappy short messages, one videos, one lengthy posts about one's lifestyle and major events. Amazon Fresh and Kroger provide the same product, Twitter and Tiktok do not.
And I notice you're muddying the waters and avoiding the real question by talking about the Mississippi where you can actually claim they compete, but that's hardly the norm, nor where you'd find most ships or trains, now is it?
What makes a competitor a competitor is not how the particular good or service needing to exactly match, but whether the good or service of one serves as a sufficient substitute for the other good or service. In fact, figuring out a different spin on a good/service is frequently how competitors are outcompeted and innovation happens.
So your argument is that 15 second Tiktok videos, Facebook timelines, and tweets are all sufficiently similar that one could simply substitute between them? I don't find that compelling at all given how vastly different they are.
TBH the worst stuff we are seeing is some kind of trust or serendipitous conspiracy side of things than natural monopoly problem - after all, there is a number of slightly different social media coexisting, and smaller competitors starting up due to their failures...
With the latter's main problem being deplatforming and PR attacks mostly by separate, non-competing companies linked with the big competition by political and cultural connections between said other companies and their competitors, rather than direct competition.
I agree and was working towards that point by mentioning the suspicious collusion between Amazon and Twitter.
To clarify, I don't really think it's about it being a competitor. The big social media companies don't move against existing smaller competitors like that, SnapChat didn't get straggled in the crib even though it competes pretty directly with Facebook's Instagram. I also don't really think Twitter was genuinely threatened by Parler or Gab any more than SB is threatened by us. It is purely an ideological thing, it's not about the money. I think on some level a lot of right-wingers, particularly conservatives, want to believe that corporations are woke only for cynical reasons, that it's just to get money. And maybe it was at one point, but the Kool-Aid is in their drinking water now, so to speak.
Ideological competition is still competition.
Internet sites and particularly social media aren't the same as other media. I can go on Twitter and can start saying whatever I want to whatever audience chooses to listen to me. I can't do that with Simon & Schuster, or Fox News. Do you want Twitter to be like that?
Like, it's pretty ridiculous what you guys want in the end. Either Twitter turns into a space where every post you make has to be pre-approved by mods. Or it turns into 4chan. I'm fairly confident that most people do not want an Internet environment where every giant social message board looks like 4chan.
Those are hardly the only outcomes and I've presented several alternatives already.
We could have a return to walled gardens and professionally moderated forums, f'rex. We could have politics turned into a protected class, such that sites like Twitter can't ban people for their political opinions anymore than they could ban somebody for having the wrong skin color. We could see Twitter turn into 4Chan but also have extremely good user controls for ignoring the trolls, where
users decide what they want censored for themselves
personally, not influential CEOs deciding who we're
allowed to listen to. We could see any number of other options I haven't foreseen as well.
When a person tells you there's only two options, either they get what they want or
bad thing happens to you, you can pretty much assume they're selling you a load of hogwash and trying to force you to give them what they want. Reality is vastly more complex and rarely forces complex choices to be so limited.
Remember, when the Joker gives Batman a sadistic choice Batman always finds a third option.
Well, Parler sued Amazon basically using the argument you're making, and we saw how that turned out for it. And I have no idea what your argument even is with the app stores. Are we now arguing that stores are required to carry apps on their stores?
Well the suit's still ongoing at this point, and it appears
Are stores required to carry apps? Well no, but there's only one store allowed per phone and it's owned by the same people that own the phone's operating system and a load of other programs on the net. These are forming trusts with a lot of collusion that distorts the free market and lets them have an unfair advantage. I'd be totally in favor of either forcing a situation with more stores and more competition, or forcing companies to break up and the app stores not being allowed to have an fiduciary interest in any app or internet-based company, in order to prevent a gross conflict of interest and collusion.
Like, here's the thing if we want to speak on a more fundamental problem: I have zero problems with societal censorship. Every society practices societal censorship in that there are things which you are and are not supposed to say in decent company. That is part of enforcing the common values and ethics which every society must have to survive. Those ethics vary from nation to nation and from age to age, but what those ethics are frankly is less important than that the community has agreed to be bound by those ethics.
I object to society using the government to enforce those ethics, because the government as an agency of violence can do things to those outside the ethic which society cannot, and those outside the ethic should not have to face those consequences. But that does not mean those outside the ethic should not face any consequences at all.
If there is no societal censorship, the result will be chaos, a weakening of the societal ethic, and a collapse of the nation and nihilism. If societal censorship has failed, the response is nog some idealistic freedom. The response will be that the people, bereft of morals, will turn to a government to enforce censorship and morals for them, generally in the form of a singular individual.
Societal censorship is a thing and I agree it's a good thing. However what's happening isn't society vs. government, we're looking at big tech megacorporations censoring
society, often in collusion with the government via politicians they make big campaign contributions to.