Who has 4-5 taxi apps on their phone? Who has 2-3 social profiles? Who has the habits of jumping from a searching engine to another?
Uber, Lyft, and some smaller competitors already exist yet people don't need all the apps; they just choose one and it works fine. Likewise with search engines: some people use Google, some use Bing, some use DDG. It's suboptimal but monopolies are suboptimal in different ways.
The problem with network effects was solved in the 1980s breakup of AT&T where the telcos all federated with each other. Federated protocols like SMTP and XMPP existed before Facebook and Twitter; rather than a historical accident they made a decision to pursue lock-in.
Uber, Lyft, and some smaller competitors already exist yet people don't need all the apps; they just choose one and it works fine. Likewise with search engines: some people use Google, some use Bing, some use DDG. It's suboptimal but monopolies are suboptimal in different ways.
The problem with network effects was solved in the 1980s breakup of AT&T where the telcos all federated with each other. Federated protocols like SMTP and XMPP existed before Facebook and Twitter; rather than a historical accident they made a decision to pursue lock-in.