The article was dated enough that I assumed at first that it was written 5-10 years ago. Most of the competition he claims for Amazon doesn't exist; Lulu is an effective non-entity, and FB is much, much better than it was when it became the dominant player in social media (and somewhat less dominant; I know quite a number of people who are on G+ and not on FB. More, to bring in tertiary players like Diaspora, which has already gone out of business, ignores -why- Diaspora failed--not because FB is unassailable, but because they had an unworkable business model, and because when people technically analyzed their software, they found it deeply wanting and a decided unimprovement on, say, Gnu Social (which Mastodon uses) as federated social networks go.

Of course, a middleman (as Amazon, and Google (which, since it is actually 2017, is a lot more than search; anyone heard of Android? Google's massive ad network which has kicked doubleclick so far we don't have blocklists for it any more? Google Drive/chat?), and FB all are), network effects make them pretty solid--as long as they are the best. And make no mistakes; all three companies are -very- good at what they do, despite our occasional/frequent annoyances with features they roll out that we don't want and never did.