That’s... so obviously false I don’t even know where to start. Apple doesn’t even have majority market share in the markets it competes in. https://twitter.com/rollcall/status/1313617543656017922

The idea that Facebook has a social networking “monopoly” is ridiculous; the only way people don’t laugh out loud at that is if they’re defining “social networking” to mean “services that look and function exactly like Facebook”.

Google doesn’t have a search “monopoly”; they have a really popular search engine. I promise, Bing & Yahoo & DuckDuckGo all still exist, and they’re all exactly as easy to access as Google. You don’t have to drive to some obscure off-brand search engine store.

I saw a post earlier today where someone said (probably not verbatim, but damn close): “Of course Google’s a monopoly. What are we supposed to do, use Bing?” I mean... yes? If you want to? It’s faster to type, even.

I think what’s going on here is we have a variety of concerns—both reasonable and irrational—about the power of big tech companies, and most people don’t have well developed models for thinking about those concerns other than “monopoly.”

So—when the only tool you have is a hammer and all that—people try to shoehorn those concerns into a “monopoly” framework & wind up saying things that sound ridiculous if you think about them for five minutes, even when the underlying concerns aren’t ridiculous.

For instance: If you want to patronize a different company for those firms’ consumer facing offerings, you have plenty of options. If you want to avoid their INFRASTRUCTURE, then as @kashhill discovered in her great series, that’s almost impossible. https://gizmodo.com/i-cut-the-big-five-tech-giants-from-my-life-it-was-hel-1831304194

That is not, in any traditional sense, a problem of “monopoly.” It’s not something we previously considered a “problem” at all: There are tons of companies it’s nearly impossible to avoid indirectly “patronizing”. That doesn’t mean it’s not a valid concern in the modern context!

But you will not think clearly or productively about those concerns if you’re determined to shove them into Standard Oil vintage mental models, because that’s the only language you have for talking about problems (or potential problems) of corporate power.