Actually, this is an excellent area that we probably won't be able to get too deeply into in the limited time we have. I recommend my colleague Roger McNamee, who's been doing a lot of active work on that in the Open Markets Institute in the United States.
You're absolutely right. We were a tiny start-up company, so we're not really so relevant to that conversation. But the point is that if you were trying to build an alternative to Facebook, YouTube or Twitter, it would be very hard for you to succeed because these are built on network effects. In Senator Mark Warner's policy paper that came out on his policy prescriptions, he talked about the need for interoperability. You need to be able to move interoperably between these networks. This actually happened in the late 1990s with AOL Instant Messenger. It used to be that AOL had the most popular messaging application, AOL Instant Messenger, and it was locked in. The reason everybody had to use AOL is that they had to use AOL Instant Messenger. Then they were forced, with legislation, to make that interoperable, and that helped loosen the monopoly that AOL had at the time on essentially these Internet services.
I think we need to look at similar things like that. What's harder with social networks is that you can't just move my data off to something else because my data is connected to all the posts I've made in other people's profiles and they have privacy settings so that I can't simply migrate over onto some new platform. I think this is a really important area, and it does have to do with the consolidation of power and the ability for them to quash competition.
One last thing is that Facebook has a thing called Onavo, which is a VPN tracking service. They can actually track rising competitors that are using their platforms. By knowing which ones are up and coming, they can basically start to steal their features or shut them down. There are different competitive tactics they can use.