> A company removing itself from the market creates room for competition.

Not always.

Let's say, just for the sake of the argument, that people are lazy and social (so far so good), so much so that they spend all their free time on social media (that's the excessive part for the argument).

Don't allow links of category XYZ on social media? Well, now people won't be sharing them. Opportunity has ceased to exist.

You only get competition if there's a new social network that does allow XYZ. If the old social network is dominant, this may not be reasonable or effective — if FB pulls out of Canada, some other random university student can pull off what Zuckerberg did at university, but Canadabook still won't (except by luck) get the international cachet.

> And good riddance, too-- you shouldn't be getting your news from social media, anyway.

Yup, agreed.

Im fact, go further and get rid of FB and all the rest — I'd be happy for us to go back to e-mail and IRC (and I'm only 70% sure that's because I'm pining for my lost youth when everything was simple and I didn't have any important things to worry about).

Meta did not remove itself from the market. That would be forcing Canadians to no longer have Facebook/Instagram accounts, etc. IMO, that would be entirely defensible.

But Meta makes a lot of money from Canadians and their data, and they don’t want to lose that particular revenue stream. So they have suspended part of their offering to part of the people they serve in Canada because they don’t like a particular (flawed in one critical way, suboptimal in others) law. That’s anticompetitive behaviour, and it's the sort of thing that would get Canada's wireless companies slapped around when almost nothing else would (all three major wireless companies got slapped pretty hard when Rogers went down country-wide and 911 service was unavailable because of a lack of sharing agreements that should be the absolute norm).