That is the heart of “Aggregation Theory” from the stratechary blog. That these companies amass their market power by making their product so easy to use, they aggregate demand and are able to squeeze suppliers. They hold monopolistic power, but it is hard to argue that they “harm consumers”. Unlike old school monopolies, consumers go to aggregators because they want to, not because they are forced to.
This articulates exactly what I've been thinking about technological progress for a long time. When Discord stopped marketing itself as a chat service "for gamers," suddenly huge swathes of chat groups from high schools to electrical engineering projects moved their discussions there. It was giving me a strange feeling, maybe because Discord was a product instead of a protocol, and also because it means that all the domain-specific knowledge produced in those chat rooms becomes siloed inside the servers of a single proprietary company, unable to be indexed publicly. But that was a point in time where a company improving the quality of its product and its market reach gave me hesitation for some reason. Improving your service and having more people talking about it and using it is supposed to be a good thing, right?
The notion of a baseline of satisfaction required for consentual opting-in to monopolies seems to have produced this perpetual equilibrium where even if people don't like a service they still throw up their hands and use it because everyone else happens to use it since it is the one and only place that this one crucial discussion about X or Y is taking place in the entire world, and the subject matter has nothing to do with the platform itself, but that platform was the one that happened to win out, because it was superior.
It's caused me to think that just because you are fixing bugs or legitimately making improvements to a product, or have big dreams and an idea that actually does change the world, it doesn't mean that you are necessarily mean that you are doing the world a favor overall. The people in control or the incentives could rule what actually happens.
And the scariest thing is, people don't want to outlaw or regulate innovation or growth. People are fine with Amazon improving its marketplace to the point where there are no other marketplaces left offering a comparable set of products. A lot of people seem to be fine with letting social media grow to dominate our lives if it's reframed as "making it easier to keep in touch with your distant relatives."
Now it really is easier to keep in touch with your relatives than ever. And now, social media is also starting to dominate our lives.
>consumers go to aggregators because they want to, not because they are forced to.
Recently I wanted to buy 10-ish dead tree books in English and get them shipped to an eastern EU country. Going through the first 20~ DDG results of online stores exactly zero would ship them here. Also, the local bookstores would have only few books in English, mostly the 'bestseller'-type stuff.
Amazon was the only place that would have them available and would ship them here..
I think the statement you're replying to is more talking about staple items, not long-tail items. Things like toilet paper, toothpaste, shoes, etc. should be widely-available from local stores (both online and brick-and-mortar), and yet people still go to the aggregators for them, because it's easier and gives them predictable pricing, delivery, and quality.
Those firms are actually designed around monopsony power, not monopoly power. That is, the are the vendor you have to sell to. Walmart is famous for this.
