Tech Giants Are Less Powerful Than They Seem

But it was also something else: At this late date, Mr. Zuckerberg, with two billion users and a $560 billion market cap, is still hunting for a sustainable product and revenue model for his company.

Idiocy is in a waxing phase in America. We know that. And Facebook and its social-media fellows have plenty to answer for in the court of public opinion, with their algorithms constantly supplying us things to be unhinged about. But antitrust is not a solution for the privacy and fake news problems that come with social media. And neither is antitrust called for on traditional monopoly grounds.

Google is said to be dominant in a certain kind of “search,” but searching for purchasable items now often begins on Amazon. Meanwhile, much of the online information that most preoccupies Americans is to be found inside Facebook, Twitter and other apps whose data isn’t reachable by Google.

Facebook is surely dominant in the business of algorithmically sifting your friends’ posts to decide which you’ll see, but there remain plenty of other ways for friends to exchange information.

Facebook and Google together are said to be dominant in digital advertising. But digital ads are ads, a $540 billion annual market they hardly dominate.

Amazon is said to be dominant in e-commerce, with a 44% share. But its share of total U.S. retail sales is 4%. Its share of global retail sales is less than 0.5%.

What’s more, companies dominant today won’t be dominant a decade or two from now. That’s the lesson of history. Today’s leaders will guard existing cash flows and leave it to others to try to catch the next bit of lightning in a bottle. And for good reason: The iPhone, Google’s search box and the Facebook twist on social media were far from certain to be the windfalls they turned out to be.

Are we not catching whiffs of impending maturity? Amazon is hunting for a second headquarters to house 50,000 new staff. It’s bulking up on storefronts and fleets of trucks and planes. Wasn’t the appeal of digital economics supposed to be the ability to grow without a commensurate rise in overhead? And who will run this sprawling retail conglomerate when Jeff Bezos is gone?

Facebook not only is running out of new users to sign up, its adherents are starting to notice that they see only a tiny, Facebook-biased fraction of what their “friends” intend them to see.

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