When you're able to play a video game and have a large amount of users agree to use anything besides Discord, then I'll grant this objection. Until then, I'll refer to it as a monopoly (not over all communication of course, just within its own niche).
All the voice chat options that existed in the gaming world prior to Discord's dominance still exist, except with those options you have to pay for your own hosting like every gaming clan used to do prior to Discord. This is the cost of "free". It doesn't help that Discord has the best chat client on the market, so the competitors need to step it up.
It's a good point worth making: that Discord only exists and is as usable and popular as it is because it has a profit model and significant funding, and that's definitely a large component of why FOSS has lost users to them.
Still, as long as things like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive and Signal and perhaps even Firefox exist, I'll believe we can do better.
I think the internet being still in it's infancy essentially has allowed us to not define monopolies narrowly enough. For example, it seems obvious to people when a monopoly exists on a railroad, cars, or planes because they are distinct. However if they were judged the way the technology industry is currently, you would just say they are all travel and so no monopoly exists. I think the technology companies will be in for a very rude awakening when these niches are realized by politicians. It will probably be when young enough to really know the niches in the internet grow old enough to become politicians. The current politicians are just beginning to get a grasp on this so it's going to be some time.
I agree, and I tried not to be too narrow in my reasoning, but it's primarily speaking from what myself and so many that I know have experienced.
I initially didn't want to use it, and I know many others that didn't. Slowly the communities they loved moved to it until they were completely excluded and felt forced to adopt it as well. At this point I only have two friends left that still refuse to use it, everyone else gave in citing network effects. It reminds me precisely of how Facebook felt when I was in school, in that you were excluded from friend groups and events if you chose not to use it.
I know there are many alternatives, but getting your favorite communities to switch to them is completely intractable. Communication shouldn't be like this and I think that we can do much better, even if it takes us awhile to get there.
You can quantify a firm's market power by asking how much the firm could raise prices while the customers would stick with it. If raising the price one cent causes all your customers to abandon you, then you have zero market power. If you can raise prices 10x and sell just as much product, then you have total market power.
Yeah, I'm getting really tired of people saying "not a monopoly" when we're discussing de facto monopolies. Especially in the short term, and for knee-jerk reactions. Do you think any Discord competitor is going to welcome /r/wsb with open arms after that move? Ergo: monopoly.
