Twitch. Not for hours viewed but because they seemingly have a lock on their corner of the market. That Youtube has spent so much on game streaming, and still failing, is a sign that competition exists.
I agree that YouTube is the strongest example of the three, but I don't see how to defend the idea of a Gmail or GCal monopoly. It's hard for me to take the author objectively after that.
Facebook. I don't know how close it is, and I'm sure YouTube is still substantially ahead, but Facebook must be significant in terms of # viewed. Certainly quite different video content, though.
That's "success", not "monopoly". To be the latter you need to show that the big player is preventing the entrance of new competitors to the market. The existence of a robust and competetive ecosystem alongside Netflix, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, (even smaller players like Imgur, Reddit, Gyfcat) etc... indicates that "video hosting" isn't really a monopoly.
Seriously, everyone who is anyone is streaking headlong into a play for video hosting. If Google has a monopoly here they're managing it extraordinarily badly.
The tech industry is going to have to come to term that it's comprised of fundamentally winner-takes-all markets. The economies of scale the winner can get are tremendous, while the spending efforts are relatively low for software. So it's basically a monopoly machine. The only way this is countered is that new markets keep being created, so that helps new entrants.
If this is to change then someone needs to develop a method to request content by content and not by provider. If links to videos specified a particular video you wanted to show rather than the video on a particular provider, then providers could compete to deliver the best service to a particular set of customers.
> The economies of scale the winner can get are tremendous
Once more, though: how do you take that frame and then explain the success of Instagram, which launched straight into the face of the unbreakable monopoly you posit?
Snapchat had temporary success as well. So much for that.
We never got to see what would have happened to Instagram, had Facebook gone on to compete with it over time with a cloned product (or perhaps some other purchased competitor that might have sprung up to take on Instagram).
One of the most critical powers of a monopoly (with the typical profits that go with such), is its ability to acquire the smaller competition - frequently at high prices - that threatens it. Which is why Facebook was willing to pay such a seemingly immense sum for WhatsApp (a product with essentially zero sales). And it's why they would have happily paid a lot more for Instagram (another product with no sales) if they had demonstrated continued growth.
Wait... how can Google and Facebook both be monopolies in the same market?
Again, you're saying that "big" competitors have advantages, which no one sane disagrees with. Nonetheless that's not what antitrust law is about, and whinging about "monopoly" as a synonym for "big" just leads to pointless arguments like this one.
Instagram is a new, focused product. Essentially a new market.
Also, I said that tech markets tend to reach (quickly) a monopoly situations. But even if it's very fast, it does not mean it's instant. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr were all created in the same 10-year time span.
Windows was (is) considered a monopoly despite having a rock-solid competitor in macOS. Monopolies don't necessarily mean absolute control of the market, having the ability to significantly sway it (say 80% marketshare) is also considered a monopoly or at least monopolistic.
I think the legal term is antitrust. Bringing up the term monopoly seems to always make people assume something with 100% marketshare. The only thing needed to come under antitrust scrutiny is to be in a position that allows said entity to warp market behavior, be it by bundling, price fixing, or some other means.
Arguments about Apple's and Netscape's ability to compete were actually core to the windows antitrust case. It wasn't about market share.
Again: an argument that Google is exploiting a monopoly in video needs to be able to explain why Instagram et. al. were so successful in the face of it.
