I believe that all social networks (which are technically services) should be separated out as not simply providing a service. In the same way that the Bell Telephone System was a service, it was also inherently a social network. Owning the Bell System and selling it to people who have no alternative--because for a true alternative to exist, you would have to build a parallel Bell System--is quite a different endeavor than providing another non-social network service nationwide/worldwide. To compete against a nationwide chain of household cleaning operations, you can simply start by outcompeting them in some way in one single market. A customer who is deciding who to pay to clean their house doesn't lose out by choosing a fantastic local competitor. A customer who is deciding what social network to use to keep in touch with family and friends would be losing out if they chose an upstart social network that most of their family and friends aren't on. Even incredibly powerful and wealthy companies struggle to compete with established social media networks because no matter how good their "service" is, you aren't competing merely on how good your service is, you are competing with how many nodes are on your network.
I don't have a workable solution to how to solve this problem of social media natural monopolies, but it is a huge problem. The telephone system and the internet are the most obvious models to focus on replicating in terms of handling the problem of network effects, and to the extent that those succeed or fail in meeting the needs of their users/customers, we should at least be able to match in our solution to the problem of addressing the monopoly issues inherent in the social networks that exist or will exist in the future.
One rather radical idea I'll leave you with is -- should all communication networks be treated as one single network? In the same way that "energy" is the unifying concept that encompasses "nuclear power" and "fossil fuels", social networks, the telephone system, and the internet are all within "telecommunication". "Energy" is a lot more basic/fundamental to the laws of physics, but telecommunication is definitely universal to humans on earth now and into the future indefinitely.
