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Comment by blake929 | Hacker News Reader

High switching costs and controlling the experience end-to-end may be anti-competitive business practices, but it doesn't make Facebook a monopoly. Apple also uses similar practices, but clearly has a lot of competition.

Monopoly definition: the exclusive possession or control of the supply of or trade in a commodity or service

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FB has exclusive possession/control of digital connections to most of your friends and family. Apple doesn't have network effects like FB. Network effects + high switching costs = monopoly.

Why doesn't FB let other businesses else access friend lists via API? or send people messages via API? Same with Google and all their data about you. They just can't do it.

https://stackoverflow.com/a/50103448/1997590

At one time, they did have a very permissive API. Which got abused by Cambridge Analytica.

Exactly, the second Facebook publishes a new API, no matter how many permission dialogues you have to jump through, the NYT will be champing at the bit to write another "data sharing agreement" story.

They love to take the most bad-faith reading of the API docs to say that Facebook is giving your data away (see their story about netflix/messenger, or Microsoft's Facebook client for Windows phones)

The data is being abused by FB too. It's a little too convenient that a public scandal means FB is the only one who can use the data.

> Apple also uses similar practices, but clearly has a lot of competition.

FWIW, Apple is a monopoly as far as iOS app distribution goes. They act as if they own the relationships between app developers and their users. This stifles innovation. They also keep playing moral police even though they have no obligation to do this (as in, "you have to change the ToS of your service to be allowed to have an iOS app").

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