Rockefeller rebooted
IN 1907, in a Missouri courtroom, US government lawyers presented a diagram exposing the vast reach of Standard Oil, an intricate web of subsidiaries revealing just how massive and entangled the company had become. By the early 20th century, Standard Oil, built by John D. Rockefeller, controlled nearly all oil production, refining, and distribution in the United States.
The diagram said what words couldn’t: this wasn’t just a company, it was a stranglehold on the economy. In 1911, the US Supreme Court ordered its breakup into 34 companies, setting the foundation for modern antitrust law and the principle that no corporation should control a public resource unchecked.
Now replace oil with the attention economy, the power to reach, shape, and influence billions, and you’ll see that ‘Standard Oil’ has re-emerged. Only today’s monopolies are mining attention, monetising human behaviour, and controlling the infrastructure of public discourse.
Take Meta. With Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Threads under its belt, Meta defines social media, not just dominates it. The company controls the interfaces billions use to communicate, the algorithms that shape what we see, and the architecture of political and social reality. From local elections to global conflicts, Meta’s invisible levers decide whose voices rise and whose vanish. This is capture, not competition. And as in 1911, the consequences of unchecked dominance are too great to ignore.
Meta’s invisible levers decide whose voices rise and whose vanish.
In 2025, Meta faced a major antitrust lawsuit from the US Federal Trade Commission, accusing it of buying Instagram and WhatsApp to crush competition. Internal emails showed executives plotting to neutralise emerging threats. On the stand, Mark Zuckerberg defended Meta’s dominance with the now-infamous line: “Antitrust is supposed to be about: were consumers harmed? Were consumers suffering at all? And in this case, you’re talking about a bunch of free products that consumers really like.”
But the harm is real.
When a platform becomes so massive that it can’t manage safety or accountability, users pay the price. Just months before the trial, Zuckerberg publicly apologised after Meta failed to stop explicit adult content from appearing on teen timelines, a clear case of algorithmic negligence. This isn’t just a moderation slip; it’s what happens when a monopoly controls global communication and can’t guarantee basic safety. The question isn’t if harm exists, it’s how much we’re willing to tolerate before we call it what it is: systemic failure.
And the idea isn’t to single out Meta.
Take Google. To illustrate just one instance of real-world harms caused by monopolistic practices, Google’s search and news products often serve up headlines and AI-generated summaries without reliably sending traffic to the original publishers.
According to The Wall Street Journal, Google’s AI-generated ‘news overviews’ and content syndication have caused sharp declines in click-through rates, with top news sites seeing traffic drop by 28 to 40pc. Publishers from Forbes to CNN report collapsing referral traffic, while newsrooms globally continue to shrink under the weight of vanishing revenue.
Google and Meta dominate the global digital advertising market, together most of over $1 trillion in spending. In Pakistan alone, estimates suggest they absorb more than 85pc of all digital ad revenue. Instead of meaningful revenue sharing or paying for content, Google offers symbolic gestures like the Google News Initiative, just enough to look supportive, but nowhere near enough to sustain the journalism it profits from. To grasp the scale of extraction, Columbia University researchers estimate Google owes publishers around $10 billion annually, with Meta close behind at $2bn, figures that dwarf the token support these companies currently offer.
The result? Newsrooms face collapsing business models, while the platforms extract value from their work, stealing reach, eroding traffic, and offering only symbolic support, destabilising the future of journalism. To reiterate, this is just one consequence of monopolistic power.
It’s no longer radical to say social media is broken. What started as a promise of connection has become a centralised, exploitative machine where a few corporations control what we see, say, and share. And the so-called choice between platforms? Just monopoly musical chairs.
If the 20th century broke up oil empires, the 21st century needs to break the digital ones. But this time, it’s not about regulation but redesign. The future of social media must be decentralised. Not because it’s fashionable to talk about Web3 or federated networks, but because the centralised model has reached its logical and dangerous conclusion.
The writer is a media strategist and trainer, and founder of Media Matters for Democracy, a media development organisation.
Published in Dawn, July 14th, 2025
