What should we do about network-effect monopolies?

I looked at your examples of network effect monopolies and a lot these aren't very convincing:

• Chrome isn't a monopoly at all. I guess maybe some websites work better on it, but I've been using Firefox for years and never run into this. If you want addons that work well, it's trivial to use Firefox. The fact that most people don't care doesn't mean they're being forced to use Chrome.
• The complaints about Facebook seem like they would apply to any site that's ad-funded, monopoly or not. If you threaten a company's funding source, they'll block you. It's also worth pointing out that Facebook isn't a monopoly in their actual business (selling ads). Their actual customers have plenty of options (Google, Twitter, TV, mail, etc.). Their products also have other options (Twitter, Discord, Snapchat, whatever the youths are using these days).
• Grubhub's fake restaurant thing was an attempt to get users/restaurants specifically because they're not a monopoly. If they were a monopoly, restaurants would be signing up on their own (since it would be the only way to get business).

Some of the other links are more convincing, so it's strange to start with the weak examples.

interoperability. we take it forgranted everywhere else in life: when you have to replace a fridge it’s easy because they all have the same electrical/water hookups. replace a door, same thing: standardized size, hinges, and knobs. going further, i’ve been upgrading the cabinets/drawers in my kitchen: they’re standard size so i can buy 3rd party silverware inserts, or even inserts made specifically to organize anything that’s k-cup shaped. i replaced the casters on my office chair with oversized carpet-friendly wheels: standardized attachments. so many things in the physical world are made to be interoperable because it facilitates mass production and allows for any company to innovate in any sliver they see. it’s cheaper for producers, and improves the consumer experience.

i assure you those causes and benefits aren’t restricted to the physical world. i read this post in my RSS client, even as my roommate was fiddling with the router because all my RSS feeds get saved for offline reading in the background, before i even decide to read them. simultaneously that RSS standard allows LessWrong to get more reach.

i confront the crux of your post differently: “how do i navigate adversarial relationships (with a business)”? increasingly my approach is to just not engage (or engage less). when it comes to mid-size group stuff, it’s usually pretty easy: LW is just better than Facebook, reddit, or anything that sees its users as a resource to extract from.

for smaller groups or1-to-1 things i choose SMS over Discord; for the people where that’s too low-bandwidth and IRL hangouts aren’t practical, treat any monopoly replacement (signal, telegram, etc) as explicitly ephemeral: as these services switch to value capture we hop ship without losing anything. the world is large enough that there are plenty of substitute activities even if you disengage from Facebook, say. but it’s easier to adopt a policy of “don’t engage” a priori, rather than integrate them into your life and then decide to cut back on them..

You might enjoy Cory Doctorow's take on this - such as https://onezero.medium.com/demonopolizing-the-internet-with-interoperability-b9be6b851238 and https://locusmag.com/2023/01/commentary-cory-doctorow-social-quitting/

It seems like you complain at the same time about AMP standardization and speak in favor of more standardization. 

Even on the margin, anything that costs Facebook users also makes it less valuable for its remaining users—it’s a negative feedback loop. The same goes for any other site where users create value for other users, like Twitter or Craigslist or Yelp or Wikipedia. (It’s not an accident that these are some of the most stagnant popular websites!)

Wikipedia's strategy is not optimized for having a lot of users. In contrast to most other websites, it's not KPI driven. The active editor count of Wikipedia is still under its 2007 peak. 

The Wikimedia Foundation is much better at spending money to host big conferences than it is at spending it to improve user counts. 

So far for tech monopolies, people seem to be focused mostly on breakups—e.g. Facebook from Instagram/Whatsapp—but standardization seems to have produced much better outcomes in the past. (I like email and the Web a lot more than National Grid…) 

Signal started out by adhering to a federalized standard. It turned out that made it hard to develop new features and they switched away from following a federalized standard. 

The email standard provides neither a way to verify the sender of an email nor encrypt your email. 

I think you are generally wrong in the assumption that standardization doesn't produce problems. An association of firefighters is responsible for setting the standards for solar cells in the US. From the firefighter perspective, Module Level Rapid Shutdown is useful. They like being able to shut down solar cells. The fact that it makes solar cells more expensive isn't important to firefighters. 

At first sight, it seems like "freemium" might be the answer. Have an ordinary Facebook/Youtube account for free, full of ads; or pay $25 for an ad-free experience. Now you can have both, and on the same network.

Unfortunately, there seem to be two big problems with this. First, companies love to double-dip! Having paying customers is good, but having paying customers and showing them ads and selling their private data is even better! When you have captured the market by network effect, you only need to make the experience of the paying customers slightly less horrible in order to extract money from them. Which you can achieve simply by making the experience of non-paying customers slightly more horrible. (If people are willing to pay to remove 6-second ads, they will probably also pay to reduce 15-second ads to 6-second ads.)

Second, the people willing to pay, especially for something so trivial like having a somewhat more pleasant online experience, are exactly the ones that your clients want to advertize to. (The 6-second ads displayed to people who already paid to reduce their ad exposure are probably way more profitable than the 6-second ads previously displayed to non-paying people.) It's like being blackmailed for money; your willingness to pay only makes you a more juicy target the next time.

>standardization and interoperability (e.g. email, the Web

Unfortunately, we're seeing some unwinding of this, as the dominance of gmail makes it impractical to self host (because they refuse to deliver your mail), and with the rise of apps rather than web pages. 

Standardization/interoperability seems promising, but I want to suggest a stranger option: subsidies!

In general, monopolies maximize profit by setting an inefficiently high price, meaning that they under-supply the good. Essentially, monopolies don't make enough money.

A potential solution is to subsidize the sale of monopolized goods so the monopolist increases supply to the efficient level.

For social media monopolies, they charge too high a "price" by using too many ads, taking too much data, etc. Because of the network effect, it would be socially beneficial to have more users, but the social media company drives them away with their high "prices". The socially efficient network size could be achieved by paying the social media company per active user!

I was planning to write this up in more detail at some point (see also). There are of course practical difficulties with identifying monopolies, determining the correct subsidy in an adversarial environment, Sybil attacks, etc.