Not strictly monopolies, but they are so large they can move capital around making many services/products artificially cheap for the client. In my opinion this makes competition unfair and constitutes a monopoly in some sense.
Google and Facebook are monopolies. Does it matter? [audio]
31–40 of 128 posts
Re: Google and Facebook are monopolies. Does it matter? [audio]
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
The service google and facebook provide is access to their captured audience. In the case of google that is the advertisement market with search and the platform of youtube. It is rather commonly known that many video producers are extremely unhappy using youtube but feel locked in since thats where the audience is, and the audience is equally locked in since youtube is where the producers are. New video platforms po…
And yet Netflix seems to be doing fine delivering video and competing with Youtube for users?
Different markets. Film (90m+), TV (40m) and streaming (...) have all found their own markets and as such managed to not be captured to the youtube platform. Not to say that Youtube has not tried, with both youtube red and streaming existing on the site, but they have not been that competitive against established players in those markets.
Re: Google and Facebook are monopolies. Does it matter? [audio]
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Traditional monopolies "control supply of a good or service, and where the entry of new producers is prevented or highly restricted." Well Courts have ruled the NFL is a monopoly...but there is no control over new entities organizing and playing football games (i.e. not prevented or highly controlled).
Is that really true? I guess I'd assume the NFL have exclusive contracts with most cities for their stadiums and for teams as in they probably have a contract that disallows the city from having another team?
People don’t recall but when the USFL popped up in the 80’s it was actually pretty successful as a “Spring Time” football league. Playing in Spring they didn’t compete with NFL or College Football and provided a product people wanted to fill the gap between seasons.
It was good old Donald Trump who lead the effort to change the season and compete directly with NFL by changing the season to Fall. Of course the USFL went bankrupt and Trump sued including a claim anti-trust/monopoly. The Court famously agreed NFL was in fact a monopoly but awarded Trump damages in the amount of $1.
Re: Google and Facebook are monopolies. Does it matter? [audio]
#34If they are, they are not a traditional monopolies. Traditional monopolies "control supply of a good or service, and where the entry of new producers is prevented or highly restricted." In this case, the supply of a good or service (social networking, webpage indexing and searching) are not controlled by Facebook and Google because they aren't finite resources. Anyone can index the web and anyone can build a social n…
>Anyone can index the web and anyone can build a social network and Google/Facebook aren't going to crush you with lawsuits or some other nefarious tactic to maintain their position (AFAIK).
Maybe but you're also almost certainly going to be acquired by them.
Re: Google and Facebook are monopolies. Does it matter? [audio]
#35If they are, they are not a traditional monopolies. Traditional monopolies "control supply of a good or service, and where the entry of new producers is prevented or highly restricted." In this case, the supply of a good or service (social networking, webpage indexing and searching) are not controlled by Facebook and Google because they aren't finite resources. Anyone can index the web and anyone can build a social n…
Agreed, I made a similar point recently[1], that a monopoly should be judged by lock-in, not by raw market percentage, which is an arbitrary measure anyway; no one cares that I have a monopoly on SilasX-labor. What matters is whether it's hard for others to offer alternatives to SilasX-labor and whether buyers can switch to that alternative. In that sense, you should worry about monopolies on OSes or rail routes, whi…
> What matters is whether it's hard for others to offer alternatives
It is monstrously hard to offer alternatives. The barrier to entry is the massive engineering effort to compete.
Google is not just a search engine. It is an email server and client, a calendar, an online office suite, a cloud provider, a mobile platform, and I can go on listing things to fill up several pages of what Google is.
Even if DuckDuckGo is a better search engine, it offers 1% of the feature set and can't compete. The engineering effort needed for it to compete effectively is astronomical. Imagine what it would take to build out all of those Google services that are tightly integrated and not just build them out (like Microsoft), but build them out well. That is the barrier to entry.
Re: Google and Facebook are monopolies. Does it matter? [audio]
#36[deleted]
Re: Google and Facebook are monopolies. Does it matter? [audio]
#37If they are, they are not a traditional monopolies. Traditional monopolies "control supply of a good or service, and where the entry of new producers is prevented or highly restricted." In this case, the supply of a good or service (social networking, webpage indexing and searching) are not controlled by Facebook and Google because they aren't finite resources. Anyone can index the web and anyone can build a social n…
"Datapoly"
For me, the reason they have such power in the marketplace is because they have the historical data on all these users. "Lock-in" can be overcome. Technical capabilities can be bettered by other companies, but when it comes to training sets, it's hard to start late...
Re: Google and Facebook are monopolies. Does it matter? [audio]
#38Google is trying to be "the academic company". As a result, it has infiltrated and infested UC Berkeley, Stanford's main competition (Google is a Stanford company).
There is no place in the private sector for wannabe universities. We have real universities for that. Greed and knowledge do not mix.
Re: Google and Facebook are monopolies. Does it matter? [audio]
#39I think their behavior matters more than their market share. As other commenters pointed out, defining market share of an infinite resource is not very useful.
These companies buy potential disruptors at inflated prices. Sometimes they shut the disruptor down to maintain the status quo; sometimes they guide the disruptor to create a new market. In either case, it creates a positive feedback mechanism that increases their influence and further entrenches the parent company in their customers' lives.
As a market (and governed society) we need to decide if this is something that we want or not. It may be too late for pure market pressure to stop this behavior, leaving it to regulators. Or we can decide it's acceptable and let it go for the benefit of the innovations that these companies create.
I don't know if monopoly is the right word for this, but it's something and it does matter.
Re: Google and Facebook are monopolies. Does it matter? [audio]
#40If they are, they are not a traditional monopolies. Traditional monopolies "control supply of a good or service, and where the entry of new producers is prevented or highly restricted." In this case, the supply of a good or service (social networking, webpage indexing and searching) are not controlled by Facebook and Google because they aren't finite resources. Anyone can index the web and anyone can build a social n…
If your argument was applied to something like money, the conclusion would be that governments do not have any control over the financial system, because anyone can chose to barter and anyone can chose to break the law.
>What Facebook and Google have is massive, large scale user loyalty.
Google has effective control of web standards.
Edit: Also, the podcast directly addresses your comment. In fact, that's what it is about.