It might be a fun few years for antitrust. The monopolies who control everything and who govern with absolute power might be the biggest reason we’re here.

I have one idea about what to do with a highly visible one like Twitter: Make it into a National Park.

“Breaking up” a social media monopoly can only be accomplished in one way: By opening the protocol it runs on, returning ownership of the data to its users, and allowing them to portably take their data to any network that using the protocol. Anything less is tepid posturing.

This is why network-effect monopolies are so strong. The core value of the company is that so many people are on it (stuck using it). The product itself can objectively suck (Facebook) and it doesn’t matter. “Breaking it up” just creates a vacuum for another one.

In the case of most monopolies, the product being sold is a commodity but the company is proprietary. In the case of social media, the companies (and their shitty apps) are a commodity but their product (billions of entrapped users and their surveillance of them) is proprietary.

So as much as there are risks to nationalizing things, the government isn’t always great at stuff, etc., etc., the best way to deal with social media monopolies is to nationalize them, with strict regulatory oversight, privacy, and at least a chance of due process.

Twitter is perfect to use as a test case:

  1. It’s relatively small (less than 200m daily users) while still 100% a monopoly.
  2. Everything that makes Twitter great was built by its community: developers like Loren Brichter and The Icon Factory and users who invented @s, retweets, threads…

When Twitter becomes a National Park and the protocol is opened up for people to take their portable data to open communities (or stay on the main government one), Trump’s account can be cancelled because he broke 8,310 laws on it, not because Jack Dorsey is getting some heat.

If you’re as interested in monopolies and antitrust as I am, you should get on Matt Stoller’s Substack. He would almost certainly think this thread is ridiculously dumb, but I posted it freely. Complain to Jack and Mark. They own this shit.