On Friday, Democratic presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren announced her plan to break up tech giants Amazon, Facebook, Apple, and Google. Her argument goes wobbly in places—does anyone really care that we have Bing in addition to Google?—but the overarching theme is the progressive one about big business getting too big for society’s good.

Antonio García Martínez (@antoniogm) is an Ideas contributor for WIRED. Previously he worked on Facebook’s early monetization team, where he headed its targeting efforts. His 2016 memoir, Chaos Monkeys, was a New York Times best seller and NPR Best Book of the Year.

However, there’s one aspect of contemporary digital capitalism that I think many commenters and antitrust crusaders miss: Silicon Valley isn’t full of monopolists. It’s full of what are (technically) called monopsonists.

A monopsony is a market dominated by one buyer and many sellers; it’s the inverse of a monopoly, and requires entirely different antitrust remedies. In a monopoly situation, antitrust means disaggregating supply to bring relief to consumers. In a monopsony situation, antitrust means disaggregating demand to bring relief to suppliers, which over the long term should benefit consumers.

To see how this plays out, consider this old Silicon Valley saw: The biggest media company in the world, Facebook, produces no media; the biggest hospitality company in the world, Airbnb, owns no hotel rooms; the biggest taxi company in the world, Uber, owns no taxis.

If the saying is true, then what defines Uber as a taxi company? The fact that everyone drunkenly looking for a ride in San Francisco’s Mission District at 2 am on a Saturday is staring at its app, that’s what. Ditto people looking to read the news of the day (Facebook) or buy an offbeat and unique travel experience (Airbnb).

Controlling Demand Rather Than Supply

Monopsony so flips the script of what we normally think about commerce that it’s worth citing an example.

Perhaps the best one comes from the brick-and-mortar world: Walmart. As amply elucidated in Charles Fishman’s The Walmart Effect, Walmart is a ruthless monopsonist, having seized an enormous amount of retail demand in the US and then—and here’s the key distinguishing point from monopolists—begun offering its customers more and more for less and less. It maintains roughly 25 percent gross margins by chiseling suppliers endlessly, applying the dealmaking screws on everything from mangoes to Levi’s jeans, and demanding volume discounts that it uses to undercut smaller retailers, demolishing Main Streets everywhere. The company keeps shoppers happy and suppliers miserable by threatening to shut off its demand spigot.

How does monopsony work in the world of bits instead of atoms? Consider Airbnb, which recently acquired just-in-time hostelry Hotel Tonight. At first glance, this seems odd: What does the Berkeley in-law unit or rural Montana cabin of Airbnb have to do with stuck business travelers booking the Ace Hotel? Why wouldn’t Airbnb buy, say, property management firms to more closely integrate its supply pipeline, as every market-dominating firm since Standard Oil has done?

The answer: Unlike supply monopolists, which integrate vertically, demand monopsonists integrate demand horizontally, adjacent to their core business, dominating their value chain via a bottoms-up stranglehold. Thus, Airbnb (which, again, doesn’t control a single bed) buys another service that is nothing more than a mobile app—an inbound flow of sales leading to the actual suppliers of lodgings.

The media version is Facebook, which is a monopsonist of human attention. The social network leverages suppliers of media, typically its users themselves, who voluntarily supply Facebook via their own hypermediated personal lives. Other suppliers are conventional media outlets like The New York Times or Fox News, which (semi)voluntarily share their expensive-to-produce content via News Feed.

As in Walmart’s relationship with its suppliers, this monopsony grants Facebook the leverage to set prices with media suppliers, which universally are … zero dollars. Other than a few experiments in paying for video or sharing ad revenue with content producers, Facebook largely pays nothing for its media. Users are arguably “paid” for their content with Facebook’s service itself. For outside media, Facebook provides distribution for their content. The problem there is that Facebook has also usurped much of those outlets’ advertising, negating the monetization potential of the very distribution they provide. (That’s largely the result of an advertising paradigm that Google created and Facebook expanded on, which flipped the power in advertising from publishers selling audiences—the readers of a publication—to advertisers targeting specific individuals based on their own data, or that of intermediaries like Facebook. The publisher went from a media price-setter to a price-taker, and prices plunged.) Thanks to Facebook, conventional media lost control of both distribution and monetization at once, a mortal blow.