181–190 of 260 posts
I think the key point here is not whether Google is abusing its effective monopoly willingly, its that it exists at all. There may be alternatives, but not viable ones. Try not supporting Chrome or ignoring Chrome requirements such as security mandates, you will go out of business. You can say these are 'good' for the consumer but the fact that Google has the ability to unilaterally change the web itself is partially…
iOS.
I think the key point here is not whether Google is abusing its effective monopoly willingly, its that it exists at all. There may be alternatives, but not viable ones. Try not supporting Chrome or ignoring Chrome requirements such as security mandates, you will go out of business. You can say these are 'good' for the consumer but the fact that Google has the ability to unilaterally change the web itself is partially…
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But new and small businesses can't switch where they go to raise awareness, which always seems to be an underappreciated consequence of Google's monopoly. You either have to buy Google ads or do SEO, and if you SEO, Google can pull the rug out from under you at any moment and you have no recourse.
There are lots of competing vendors for display ads. You can also advertise on facebook and Bing. For search ads, I donno. If 1 tv channel was by far the most popular, would ads on it make them an illegal monopoly for businesses that wanted to advertise?
Google has a monopoly on search ads in the same way that McDonald's has a monopoly on the Big Mac.
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Jesus, yes, how did I have to scroll down this far before I read "ATT was a government monopoly"? Google doesn't have a monopoly on anything. They have the best search engine, but I can switch in seconds. Likewise the rest of their products all have very well established and really quite functional competitors. That I don't use, cause I like the big G, but I could if they annoyed me too much.
The whole issue of Google being a monopoly is silly. Fact of the matter is that they have a huge influence on the entire economy, and this influence is orders of magnitude greater than any other company.
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> Also, what does it mean to 'abuse' a monopoly position. IANAL, but there is a legally precise meaning. (Of course, lawyers will still argue over whether a particular behavior meets the definition.) But it's basically, you have a monopoly in X, and you try to use that monopoly to gain you market share in Y. For example, let's say Microsoft has a monopoly in operating systems. That's OK, nothing wrong with it, becaus…
Microsoft dealing under the table with OEM manufacturers, forcing none to reveal any details of the deals is absolutely a prime example of abuse of their monopoly position in the OS world. A shame they never convicted of these deals.
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Not so much. The invisible hand of economics just means the less efficient or less desired producers are pushed out of the market. It's just that the guy with more money can often invest it to become more efficient.
Right, money is an advantage and big companies generally have lots of money. The point is Google is not unique in that regard.
http://www.siliconbeat.com/2016/05/20/apple-microsoft-google...
While Apple has a larger total cash horde ~(216 billion) only 7% of that is in the US or 15B, Google has a larger US cash horde @$73B * 31% = 22.6B making it the largest accessible cash horde in the US.
PS: The ~$1.68 trillion in cash held by U.S. companies at the end of 2015 is kind of misleading as financial companies are required to hold cash on hand and thus can't use it for R&D or they are keeping money out of the US while waiting for a Tax holiday under Trump or possibly some other administration.
Google has a ton of competition across all of its products. It's dominating in some of them but being better then your competition is a lot different then there not being any.
Google beats the competition in some markets because they have so much power in other markets. If you start a startup even in cloud photo storage, and suddenly Google Photos comes along, you’re dead. No one will fund you anymore, and you’ve basically lost. Google has such an immense amount of network effect, and of knowledge they can gain from dominating in other markets, that if Google enters a market – unless there…
Google Photos has crushed all the other startups in the space because it's so good, not because it's been forced on everybody by a monopoly. Their other apps that aren't good enough to take over a market don't take over a market.
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This appears to be a common misconception that monopolies are bad from a public policy standpoint. For public policy, the existence of a monopoly is neither here nor there. Monopolies are problem ONLY IF their operations causes negative economic effects to consumers - typically by raising prices. Indeed in many cases (eg. Transport, Infrastructure) a monopoly is actively granted in return for guaranteed availability…
Is this true? Wasn't Microsoft brought down for harming incipient businesses by bundling competing software into the OS? Wasn't standard oil fragmented in part for receiving anti-competitive freight fares? Couldn't it be argued that Google's featured snippets and accelerated mobile pages will lower the revenue of content creators and thus decrease consumer surplus in the long term?
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> There are other ways to build a business that don't depend on search. There are also other ways to run a household that don't depend on running water. (Heck, my great-grandpa never complained about having an outhouse.) Are you saying your local water utility should be an unregulated monopoly?
You seem to be trying to build an analogy between a person's right to a material necessity and a corporation's right to a convenient market. I don't think the analogy holds. (The flip side would be "Are you saying Google should be a nationalized, government-regulated search engine?")