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Facebook's extraordinary market power seems due to the network effect, not patents.


Not just patents: trademark too.

There’s only one Facebook. Without that, you also don’t have Facebook’s network effect tying it all together.


I very much doubt that if someone could setup another service named Facebook, they could compete with them or do much beyond annoy customers and phish.


Let’s not get into hypotheticals. You know as well as I do that a large bit of Facebook’s early growth story was their brand and their reputation. That name may have been dragged through the mud in the past few years, but it still means something, and its not without value despite the recent rebranding on the parent company front.

Meta retains the exclusive right to do business using the Facebook mark and they’ll continue to enforce it. It’s the same story for any other company, and it’s a form of monopoly that the government grants, not something that would be enforceable otherwise.




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