It's too late! Have you seen another search engine make a dent in Google's market share? How about another OS challenging Windows on a PC? Another social network?
It is rather obvious that: if the main purpose of a business is to grow revenue/market share, if successful, it will eventually grow to close to 100% market share.
This situation, commonly known as a monopoly, cannot be reversed by free market competition and government needs to step in, like the US government did by splitting the telcos.
I can only guess (I am no expert) the challenge here is that government faces a legal void since these services are free as in no money was paid to use them. Owners of these services are on the ad business and there is plenty of competition there.
Government has no interest in protecting our privacy either, on the contrary, they want in!
We're left with two options: be a hermit and stop using FB and Whatsapp, or hack the system: install ad blockers + develop unofficial APIs to interact with these services on your own terms.
> It is rather obvious that: if the main purpose of a business is to grow revenue/market share, if successful, it will eventually grow to close to 100% market share.
The main purpose of a business is to generate profit, not just revenue.
Apple is pretty clear evidence that you don't need a massive market share to be highly profitable.
> be a hermit and stop using FB and WhatsApp
Is that seriously how you see this? How exactly do you think people lived 10+ years ago, before either of those things existed?
I haven't had a Facebook account for many years and I've never had a WhatsApp account. Does that make me a hermit? Should I inform my wife and son? Will my friends already be aware of my hermit status, or will you inform them for me, because obviously without Facebook or WhatsApp I have no possible way to communicate with them.
C'mon don't be so literal. Hermit as in isolated from a social interactive context. For instance, take this personal example: I like trail running. Nowadays, the ONLY way to find out when a cool race is happening is through Facebook. See, companies don't mind losing a few of us hermits that decide to stay off social networks and so they devote a great deal of its resources to communicate (and build brand) on these walled gardens. Heck! I even know new companies that don't even bother making a website anymore, the FB page is enough. Whatsapp is even worse since in my country it has become the de facto means of digital communication. I have friends, family, work and shared interest groups. Trust me, from personal experience, where I live. if you do not have FB or Whatsapp, you are out of the social interaction, a sort of hermit.
Your anecdotal experience does not change the reality of the audience that uses social networking and messaging and the dominant players in those markets. If you decided you wanted to join in your choices would be limited, and these two services dominate their respective markets.
well, in terms of anecdotal evidence, I live and work abroad and tools like Facebook and WhatsApp make it possible to communicate with my friends and family back home at a cost of next to nothing.
A decade ago, international phone calls and SMS would have cost me an arm and a leg, and there's really no equivalent for Facebook which lets me keep in touch with the lives of people I care about on the other side of the world.
Yes, there was email but that doesn't really substitute for the short low-latency, ubiquitous worldwide communication of WhatsApp (and it certainly didn't 10 years ago when it was largely tethered to a desk) nor the ability to keep up with my friends unsolicited that is Facebook (what am I supposed to do, ask all of my friends to write me an email of what they're doing once a week?)
Are global migrant workers an edge case? perhaps. But while forfeiting FB and WhatsApp wouldn't make me a hermit, it would certainly make communications with my friends and family back home to be lesser in number and richness.
I moved away from the state I grew up in at age 23. 10 years and 3 states and a different country later, I still keep in touch with the people who are actual friends.
I didn't say you shouldn't or can't use Facebook. I said it's ridiculous to equate a lack of Facebook with a hermit lifestyle, even for geographically distant people.
There are literally dozens of ways to keep in contact using Internet based communication channels. If you choose to use those that are controlled by a privacy whoring twat of a company, that's your business.
> This situation, commonly known as a monopoly, cannot be reversed by free market
Actually, it can. Android and iOS are killing Windows as mobile is taking over the world and is now the #1 computer people use. Chrome dominates IE and MacOS is devs preferred OS when it used to be Windows. I think the free market is doing its job here. As for Google, they are still doing an amazing job with Search, if they start slacking and stop innovating, then this will create incentives for competition not to mention Apple who is trying to remove Google from the Search experience altogether. Same thing for Facebook.
The only real monopolies are the one maintained by the use of force by governments where competition can not flourish simply because the government makes it illegal to do so (taxi vs uber, hotels vs airbnb etc). Apple, Microsoft, Google and Facebook don't force you to use their services at gun point, which is why people are free to leave when better alternatives come, and they always do. Unless they make use of government force to prevent competitors from doing so (taxis vs uber etc).
Have to give to the government for doing an amazing job at making people believe they are defending you from monopolies when they are in reality monopolies biggest backers.
> This situation, commonly known as a monopoly, cannot be reversed by free market
You said:
>The only real monopolies are the one maintained by the use of force by governments where competition can not flourish simply because the government makes it illegal to do so
100% agree.
Ironic that the OP is saying that "this situation cannot be reversed by free market" when it seems that the most obvious business opportunity visible here is a privacy-conscious messaging service.
No one is making the parent use whatsapp/FB, and there are many competing services. Some free, some not. Sort of stunning lack of imagination.
> Have you seen another search engine make a dent in Google's market share? How about another OS challenging Windows on a PC? Another social network?
That might be true, but I'm just fine using ddg as my search engine and Linux as my OS. Social network is a bit more tricky: it's social and, well, a network. Even so, however it is only logical that something like this happens to WhatsApp, and I well understood this since the very beginning, I used WhatsApp only because it's painless, so why not? I don't really need it. So now I'm dropping out with a clear heart and if somebody will ask, why I'm not available anymore, I'll encourage them to install some other messenger. Telegram, perhaps. It won't be really bothersome, as most of us are using several messaging apps anyway. I believe somebody will do this as well.
So, even though WhatsApp was an undeniable success, I don't really see it as something stable. As a monopoly.
> Have you seen another search engine make a dent in Google's market share?
Google has been doing a good job in maintaining the technical superiority of their search engine and haven't provided a serious incentive for people to switch, even though they came close with their whole Google+ clusterfuck.
That said, Bing and DuckDuckGo did make a dent in Google's market share, it's not much, but it's significant enough that they'll still exist for some time. The problem of Bing and DuckDuckGo is that they are optimized for the US market, not for the international one. As I kept telling people, the search results of Bing and DuckDuckGo in Europe are horrible.
But Google can lose against local search engines. Baidu is the primary search engine in China, not Google. Yandex is the primary search engine in Russia, not Google.
> How about another OS challenging Windows on a PC?
OS X hasn't won a majority, but it won the market that mattered - that of professionals and software developers. At this point, for most users, Windows is nothing more than a shell for your browser, or for games distributed by Steam or through PirateBay. If it weren't for Microsoft Office & Exchange keeping it alive in enterprises, it would have been long gone.
Even so, both OS X and Windows are going to be cannibalized by Android and iOS. It's going to be a sad day for those of us that were born in an era when computing wasn't locked down in walled gardens, but make no mistake as it happens. Chrome OS has been quite successful and Google is merging it with Android. Microsoft themselves have seen the writing on the wall, hence their desperate attempts to inflate the Windows 10 numbers and make it seem a success.
> This situation, commonly known as a monopoly, cannot be reversed by free market competition
You're wrong, free market competition works, but not in the way you think it does. You can't beat big companies at their own game, since they have huge resources that you don't, but you can invent technologies that make old monopolies irrelevant. Read the "Innovator's dilemma", it happens all the time.
>>That said, Bing and DuckDuckGo did make a dent in Google's market share, it's not much, but it's significant enough that they'll still exist for some time.
DuckDuckGo still doesn't appear as more than a blip on most market share charts.
As for Bing, the only reason it made a dent on Google is because Microsoft leveraged its own monopoly position on Windows to default searches to Bing. After that, it just had to be "good enough", which it is.
I have been critical of DuckDuckGo in the past, but it's the only one that promises privacy as a core feature. And if you couple it with a TOR browser or some anonymous proxy, you can hope for some privacy when doing sensitive searches.
A service like this doesn't need to be super popular. If it carves out an important niche, such as privacy aware users, then it can stay in the business and be a solid alternative for a long time. And they'll grow in market share too, they just need to stay afloat for long enough.
It's definitely not too late to switch away from WhatsApp. These chat apps seems to have relatively short lifetimes. ICQ, AOL IM, and Yahoo IM (at one time or another these were all dominant).
Of course, whoever comes next to dominate chat may or may not have more customer friendly privacy/data sharing than FB/WhatsApp.
> It's too late! Have you seen another search engine make a dent in Google's market share? How about another OS challenging Windows on a PC? Another social network?
I don't see what your point is with regards to search engines and operating systems. There are a ton of search engines (Bing, DDG, Gigablast, ...) and a ton of operating systems (Linux, OSX, FreeBSD, DragonFly BSD, etc). You're complaining that Microsoft and Google are dominating their markets and being abusive, but also complaining the alternatives aren't dominating the market and being abusive?
And in the grand scheme of things, social networking sites are not very important. There's a million other ways to communicate with people that don't involve Facebook, so use one of them.
It is rather obvious that: if the main purpose of a business is to grow revenue/market share, if successful, it will eventually grow to close to 100% market share.
This situation, commonly known as a monopoly, cannot be reversed by free market competition and government needs to step in, like the US government did by splitting the telcos.
I can only guess (I am no expert) the challenge here is that government faces a legal void since these services are free as in no money was paid to use them. Owners of these services are on the ad business and there is plenty of competition there.
Government has no interest in protecting our privacy either, on the contrary, they want in!
We're left with two options: be a hermit and stop using FB and Whatsapp, or hack the system: install ad blockers + develop unofficial APIs to interact with these services on your own terms.