Monopolies and Twitter
Hey, remember a few days ago when Twitter was abuzz about chain restaurants?
Well, at some point I saw someone basically call all chain restaurants monopolies, which… is not what a monopoly is.
So, let’s be clear here: A monopoly is a company that has exclusive or near-exclusive control of the market they operate in. The fact that four different chain restaurants are listed in the tweet that started this whole thing is proof that they are not, in fact, monopolies, especially since that’s obviously far from a comprehensive list.
Really, it’s tough to think of any true monopolies in the modern day. There’s probably a pretty good argument to be made that Google (well, Alphabet) has a monopoly over the web search market, and I’m sure there’s other ones that I’m not thinking of, but we don’t live in a world where Standard Oil controls an entire commodity.
So, to reiterate: just because you don’t like a company doesn’t mean it’s a monopoly. If you want to criticize something else about that company or how society treats it (which is what I think the person who prompted this post wanted to do), you should probably criticize that thing instead of just calling the company a monopoly. Thank you.