alt Hacker News> I don't use any of them and somehow successfully talk to you here
There's no train monopoly, I can just walk to the office! A monopoly does not have to exert total control to be a problem.
I shouldn't have to walk to the office because the train company has a problem with my viewpoints. I shouldn't have to spend a ton of extra effort to communicate with people and businesses because Facebook doesn't like my viewpoints, either. No private company should have that kind of power.
> that can scale to at least several hundred thousand users
It can scale for sure. Will it have all these users though? I can also go buy several containers worth of fiber optics cables. But that doesn't make me a competitor to the local ISP because there is such an incredible amount of human friction I must go through to compete with their network that it effectively locks out competitors.
You're not carrying a train load of stuff on your back. They're inherently different things. A chat website is a chat website. You can say whatever you want and talk with people without using Facebook. We're doing it right now. It's insane for one to argue you can't talk on the internet without Facebook on a website other than Facebook. This website is an example that Facebook isn't a monopoly on communicating!
There are legal limitations to installing fiber in a city or laying track. There isn't in hosting a website, at least in most jurisdictions. Open port 80 and 443, register a domain name, and you're hosting whatever you want to say to whoever wants to listen anywhere on the planet.
> I shouldn't have to spend a ton of extra effort to communicate with people and businesses because Facebook doesn't like my viewpoints, either. No private company should have that kind of power.
You don't have to. It took you the same effort (probably a lot less!) to come here and talk. There's thousands of other places on the internet you can go talk as well with about the same effort as Facebook. Go talk on X. Go to Truth Social. Or Bluesky. Or Mastodon. Or Reddit. Or Nextdoor. Or this or that and on and on and on...
Alex Jones and Infowars and such content has been banned from platforms like YouTube and Facebook and the like. I guess they just can't post their content on the internet anymore. What's this? https://banned.video/ Sure seems like they're still making all kinds of nonsense videos despite Facebook having a monopoly on the internet! They were even sued into oblivion for the things they said on the internet, and yet somehow they're still getting their message out.
Once again, you're telling me it's impossible for you to talk to me on the internet, that without Facebook it's just so onerous to do so that it's just unworkable, and yet here we are communicating and they are not involved in the slightest. How does that work?
Going back to your earlier comment, it really shows a lack of understanding of what it means to be a natural monopoly.
> because of their network effect, just like the older monopolies
This is wrong. It's not just the network effect, it's the totality of it. That there's only one train line, and the economic, physical, and political realities practically guarantees there will only ever be one or two companies operating that market. That it's practicallyimpossible for competitors to even access that market. This is untrue of Facebook. There's loads of competitors, anyone can just as easily use them. These companies come and go. Friendster? MySpace? Even the relevance of Twitter massively changed in a few years. If X bans your account or you don't want to do business with them anymore you can go talk on Threads or Mastodon or Bluesky. Nothing is preventing you from using their competing services, which is unlike having the only train line or the only fiber ISP or the only major airline servicing the area.
If you want to compete against Facebook, it's incredibly easy to get access to the market of all Internet users. Just open port 443 and run some free software. If you want to compete in the market of transnational rail, it's a bit more difficult wouldn't you say? Like, practically impossible to enter into that market at all? One can be done with a $20/mo VPS and an afternoon to get started, and the other takes probably a trillion dollars, years of political negotiations, decades of building, and then you can start to compete. Seems a little different, no?