Are Google, Amazon and others getting too big?

In the US at least I don't think it is so much the government doesn't represent the people than 2 centuries of usurpation have established a system to produce enough brainwashed drones to the will of power that they can act with the facade of democracy while actively harming the indoctrinated. It seems not to actually take a majority to create an environment where the state acts against the interests of the people, just enough of a minority to give voice and legitimacy to regressive ideology.

I think this century might be the time when all us intellectuals have to come to terms with how, in the same way you cannot get everyone into STEM to handle automation eating the economy, you cannot get everyone into enlightened politics where voters inform themselves with fact and evidence. At best, a minority, and today, a majority of people are either naturally or nurtured (often intentionally) to be incapable of participation in science and rational debate. And as long as you have this uninformed, illogical portion of the population (and of course the smaller it is the more functional your society is) it will erode democracy and liberty through powerful people taking advantage of that weakness.

What we see in the US right now is that weakness in Democracy instead being a gaping wound that has been bleeding - probably since the founding of the country, made worse by many events in history (the civil war, great depression, 9/11) that make the wound bleed greater, yielding the state from being a democracy to an oligarchy ruled by ideological indoctrination and exploitation rather than good will for ones fellow man.

That was long winded, but my point is don't throw out the notion that nations can act to improve the circumstances of their people in the general case - the US is demonstrably not doing that for observable reasons that could be fixed, but would require everyone to want to fix it.

What I'm worried about is corporations becoming so powerful that they can just change the whole economic landscape in their favour.

For example, I'm a HUGE fan of Steam, but if Valve grew large enough that you can only buy games from Valve, the only programming jobs available were at Valve for 20k$ pa whilst "Lord Gaben" was close to becoming a trillionaire along with his shareholders I'd definitely stop using their platform, even if that meant I can't play games as conveniently or not have access to them at all.

Bottom line, companies can do good, but governments need to keep them in check if they become too powerful.

I don't feel locked in to Google Wallet. That is changing, since there are only three "blessed" mobile payment systems now in Samsung, Android, and Apple Pay (rather than what we should have, a standard mobile payment API handled by ISO). But before, Paypal and Amazon Checkout both provided payment solutions that were rivals, with significant market shares, to Google Wallet.

The ad blocking in Chrome is obviously anti-competitive, but it waits to be seen if Google has actual monopolistic power in the browser space where this change doesn't drive consumers to competitors. If the advertisers Google is trying to bully fight back by having their affiliates block Chrome, either those businesses die or Chrome loses market share. We will have to see what happens, but I generally think if consumers want to use a web product, they would get another browser to do so and stop using Chrome in the same way we got 40% of people to drop IE for Firefox.

And finally, Google also doesn't have any agreements with Amazon. That is why you have to manually download their app store APK, and why it doesn't have first class installation support as a generic app like the Play Store. But Amazon is also making their own Android devices without Gapps, and Samsung is in a position to at least try it themselves if they wanted to, since they have their own app suite as well. And all Google does is require that all their apps be installed if a manufacturer wants to include any of them - which while heavy handed isn't anticompetitive to do.

If anything, a real domain of monopoly exploit by Google is how they will punish companies they disagree with in SEO, when they do have an overwhelming majority of the search market, and it has been proven in the last 2 decades of business that consumers treat Google like gospel - if its not there, it might as well not exist. People don't try using alternative search engines if they don't find what they are looking for on Google.

> Android is an example of an inferior product succeeding through monopoly control.

Android is first mover advantage. It has the same vicious feedback loop that gives Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc their monopolies - they act as middle men to third party products and services, and by capturing the audience capture the mindshare of retailers. It doesn't matter if its user and app developers, users and websites, users and friends of them, or users and actual goods retailers - each one has dominance in their market because they have the mindshare.

I don't see how Google is being particularly abusive with how they run Android. Nobody has to use their Play Store, and nobody has to develop against the Play Services thus bonding their app to the Google Suite. It is just consumers want the apps on that store, so developers use the services and ignore the competition and create a self fulfilling prophecy of monopoly.

And I'm not arguing Android doesn't have a monopoly - just Google isn't really exploiting it by only requiring all their apps come if someone wants the Play Store. The OS itself is liberally licensed, and anyone could either reuse Dalvik or write their own implementation to run APKs. I'm not sure how you would legislate to avoid the natural monopolies caused by things like the Play Store, Google Search, Facebook, or Amazon.

According to this[1] facebook employees make $277k. And this[2] says facebook has 17048 employees. Multiply those, and we get $4.7B of compensation. This[3] claims Mark Zuckerberg made $5M in a year. So he made about 0.1% of facebook's salary expenses. Not 99% like you are claiming.

Or are you referring to existing shares that people own going up in value? It's obvious that if someone owns more shares than someone else, and all shares go up in value, the person with more shares makes more profit. Are you saying it is unethical for someone to own more shares that someone else? And if you are referring to shares, you should be talking about shareholders, not employees.

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-average-total-compensation...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/273563/number-of-faceboo...

[3] http://www1.salary.com/Mark-Zuckerberg-Salary-Bonus-Stock-Op...