“Google Is as Close to a Natural Monopoly as the Bell System Was in 1956″

Or you can not base your business on the fickleness of Google's search algorithms. Ben Thompson (stratechery.com) posts one article per week publically and charged $100 a year for his newsletter. The only time he gave numbers, he has over 2000 subscribers.

There are other ways to build a business that don't depend on search.

Whats the viable alternative to Adsense? Especially when it comes to many Geo's that are hard to monetize.

If you are in a certain niche, find a publication or a podcast that serves that niche and make a direct connection to them. Marco Arment - a one man development shop - created his own podcast based advertising platform that is doing well.

What's the viable alternative to Android

The viable alternative to Android is...Android. Many companies are forking the AOSP version of Android and running their own services, including Amazon in the U.S. and a few companies in developing markets.

The danger Google faces is not that a company will come up with a better search engine, it's that people will start using search engines less as mobile takes over along with digital assistants that give you the information you want.

Facebook is already seen as a place for old people and young people may have a FB page but they aren't posting to it because their parents are on it.

You move away from a company because they are attempting "Don't be Evil", and failing in your opinion. Then you use a company that doesn't even try to rate on non-evilness and just cares about profit.

Microsoft has clearly abused their actual monopoly. They have been sued and lost for many things up to and including lying to the justice department. They are constantly being pushed back by Europe and South Korea on on bundling various things in an attempt to stifle competition. They had the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish memo where they announced all out assault on the open source community. They are patent trolling and rent seeking against Android handset makers today, right now (if they actually wanted to defend their IP they would sue google, but they want to rent seek). They put ads in local software running on peoples machines, right in the start menu. They built spyware into operating systems. They have had problems issuing rebates and paying kickbacks to squeeze other operating system out of the market. They have coerced standardization bodies. Microsoft uses security updates to force operating systems on people and stops support to convince people to move to newer versions for more money. I could go on like this for hours, but this 5 minutes of typing was enough to illustrate my point.

The worst that can be said about Google is that sometimes their things they give away for free don't work right in all the browsers, and even then they try to fix it.

This is astoundingly hypocritical.

Natural monopolies exist in situations where the fixed cost is large and the marginal (per-customer) cost is small. In these situations, it only makes sense for one company to exist, as each additional company that exists will just increase that large fixed cost, while not decreasing the per-customer cost. Therefore, each additional company just increases the the total societal and average per-customer cost.

Natural Monopolies have been defined and talked about for longer than software has been around. The long-running natural monopoly example has been that it doesn't make sense to have two power lines to your house. Another historical example includes newspapers, who have fixed article writing costs, but can distribute it to every customer in a city. Some people consider that Wal-marts in small towns are natural monopolies, given the fixed cost of a large store, and the lack of a market for more than one store in a given area.

Software, of course, has large fixed costs and small per-customer costs.

The questions for me are:

-Historically, why have some natural monopolies been considered bad (railroads, utilities), and needing regulation, and others (newspapers, Walmart) not?

-Is Google's advantage really as a true economic natural monopoly, or is it just a really powerful habit and brand? Bing seems pretty close in search quality, but yet few switch over.

-If the economic definition of natural monopoly exists at Google and most software companies - why are there countless exceptions in software: database software (Oracle, SQL Server, DB2...), Web browsers (Chrome, Edge, FireFox, Safari), calculator apps, etc?

-What are the current issues with potential natural monopolies at these software companies, and would a regulated model make them better or worse for society?

http://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/natural_monopoly.asp

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly

This is a common criticism lobbed at Microsoft. And it's just as true for Google as it is for Microsoft.