How do you protect intellectual property on the Internet?

[Honestly, now]

There's nothing to stop someone competing with ebay or facebook. They just have such a large market share that it's pretty much impossible. They are monopolies.

As for intellectual rights, anything you publish on the net is automatically copyrighted. This goes for content, I don't know about structure of a website. But I assure you--you haven't discovered a way to assemble html code that hasn't already been done before.