> The so called "network effect" is entirely artificial.
Your framing is wrong - network effects exist. Before the surveillance industry took over, the network effects accrued to protocols. Hence the popularity of SMTP (et al).
Competitive regulation, on either side of the pond, wouldn't focused on blindly "breaking up" tech companies. Rather it starts with declaring that hosted services and client software are separate products/markets, and that tying the two types of products together is anti-competitive. Thus any hosted server functionality that a proprietary webapp or mobileapp front end uses, must be through a openly published API for other competing apps to also access.
Users can then choose competing apps, and services have an incentive to make their APIs match existing apps (to facilitate easy switching to them). And with that same API, competing hosted services can access content published on the original hosted service - federation naturally falls out. In other words, preventing companies from creating friction so that network effects accrue to themselves will make the network effects accrue to protocols/interfaces again.
Your framing is wrong - network effects exist. Before the surveillance industry took over, the network effects accrued to protocols. Hence the popularity of SMTP (et al).
Competitive regulation, on either side of the pond, wouldn't focused on blindly "breaking up" tech companies. Rather it starts with declaring that hosted services and client software are separate products/markets, and that tying the two types of products together is anti-competitive. Thus any hosted server functionality that a proprietary webapp or mobileapp front end uses, must be through a openly published API for other competing apps to also access.
Users can then choose competing apps, and services have an incentive to make their APIs match existing apps (to facilitate easy switching to them). And with that same API, competing hosted services can access content published on the original hosted service - federation naturally falls out. In other words, preventing companies from creating friction so that network effects accrue to themselves will make the network effects accrue to protocols/interfaces again.