As I’m sure everyone is painfully aware, Facebook provides decent service at the extremely high cost of constantly disregarding user privacy, common decency, and laws around the world, and yet they still have billions of users.

How can this be possible? They have a monopoly.

Monopolies breed complacency, low quality, and high costs.

And Facebook has a monopoly over your friend network. You can’t leave because everyone is on Facebook. Switching to a new platform means every single one of your friends has to make a new account, download a new app, and you have to rebuild that whole network — if you can convince them at all.

It’s the same story for any platform (though most don’t charge such a high price), and it’s unavoidable. Metcalfe’s Law states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of its users, so it’s no wonder the network effect is one of the most powerful social phenomena.