I’ve long had an inkling that Facebook etc would become like railroads … massive entities that are in a sense the basic infrastructure of their time for non-local interaction, commerce, etc. Where a few ‘barons’ could battle it out for dominance in the early days and the winners make massive $$ in the process.

Most countries eventually nationalised railroads in the 20th century as a recognition of benefit of having these in public hands (though in the US I understand some of the tracks are privately owned by freight companies, so perhaps were never nationalised like Amtrak?). Though with neoliberalism some of these have been re-privatised.

In Australia in the 1990s we privatised our previous public telecommunications provider. While there is some level of market competition as a result, Telstra (former public provider) is still the dominant player. We’ve had a hell of time trying to upgrade to a fibre-to-the-home optical network since 2007, and this privatisation seems to play into that.