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I will continue to believe that this is another tentacle of William Barr's political harassment of Google and tech in general until he leads the same crusade against other 'monopolies' of the same degree like Comcast, Apple, Boeing, Amazon, United Airlines, etc.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2018/09/25/inside-...
This is interesting because it seems like the DOJ's definition of monopoly is changing, which I think is a good thing. Since the late 80s (roughly), antitrust litigation has only been brought on the basis of a monopoly's negative impact on consumer prices (i.e. does the existence of a monopoly cause the consumer to have to pay higher prices?). That ignores monopolies that impair the ability of smaller companies to en…
Google's dominant market position was achieved through market competition not through impairing the ability of smaller companies to enter markets. Even in Google Chrome you can pick DuckDuckGo and Ecosia as your default search engine. Most of Chrome users probably never heard of those two search engines. For example would YouTube be successful as it is today if it wasn't Google's resources and knowledge to skyrocket…
Have you been living under a rock?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_vs._Google#Goog...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not saying google isn't a monopoly, it classically is, same with facebook. But I wonder if Goog wasn't a majority "blue" company would he aggressively go after them. The problem is there are so many oligarchy's controlling industries. Chips, well its a two or three company game(intel, amd, ARM). Lets look at airlines, well its united, delta, american etc. Communications(cell phones), ATT, Verizon, Sprint/Tmobile. Ame…
The government intentionally created the Airline oligopoly by banning foreign airlines from operating domestic flights in the US, and further by allowing United, American and Delta to form joint-ventures with foreign airlines to control prices/schedules between continents. Is Google really a monopoly? Many people use Outlook, iPhones, Apple Maps, AWS, Bing, HERE maps etc...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
DuckDuckGo has a better search engine than Google right now, imo.
DuckDuckGo has better human-centered results, but they miss a lot of the more technical stuff.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google's dominant market position was achieved through market competition not through impairing the ability of smaller companies to enter markets. Even in Google Chrome you can pick DuckDuckGo and Ecosia as your default search engine. Most of Chrome users probably never heard of those two search engines. For example would YouTube be successful as it is today if it wasn't Google's resources and knowledge to skyrocket…
> Even in Google Chrome you can pick DuckDuckGo and Ecosia as your default search engine. And making this argument is exactly why they added search engine selection. They wanted to be able to point to this tiny insignificant detail that might cost them a negligible fraction of Chrome searches and hold it up as market competition when the inevitable antitrust suit came along. Have you ever heard of a for profit compan…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I mean, your choices for flying somewhere are what - Delta or United? Both delta and united are operating very high capital cost businesses on thin margins. What can we gain by trust busting them? > What about for internet service - just a single ISP in most areas. ISPs can be dealt with effectively at the local level - and they are not as invasive or as politically powerful as the tech giants. I’ve never had my se…
> Both delta and united are operating very high capital cost businesses on thin margins. You are right, the capital cost of millions of servers worldwide, with security guards, and buildings, and cooling is zero.
Not even close to the capital costs and margins of an airline.
Compare AWS margins and capital costs with Amazons retail margins and capital costs for example.
This is interesting because it seems like the DOJ's definition of monopoly is changing, which I think is a good thing. Since the late 80s (roughly), antitrust litigation has only been brought on the basis of a monopoly's negative impact on consumer prices (i.e. does the existence of a monopoly cause the consumer to have to pay higher prices?). That ignores monopolies that impair the ability of smaller companies to en…
Google's dominant market position was achieved through market competition not through impairing the ability of smaller companies to enter markets. Even in Google Chrome you can pick DuckDuckGo and Ecosia as your default search engine. Most of Chrome users probably never heard of those two search engines. For example would YouTube be successful as it is today if it wasn't Google's resources and knowledge to skyrocket…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This has been a major gap between the American understanding of monopoly protection and the European one. In the European space, protection of smaller business' ability to compete is factored in. But the US space, in general, has not cared if smaller businesses can compete and tends to take a laissez-faire attitude towards business-on-business market pressures. It's the effect of the market on consumers that's paramo…
Funny how making books cheap is considered a failing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It would be a boom for the economy Why? Are they inefficient? Have their resources been mis-allocated? > jobs For the sake of jobs? That pay more or less? > create much needed competition Are they charging too much?
> Are they charging too much? The total ownership of virtually all the data for a huge percentage of the population could be argued to be a high price, depending on your perspective.
I will continue to believe that this is another tentacle of William Barr's political harassment of Google and tech in general until he leads the same crusade against other 'monopolies' of the same degree like Comcast, Apple, Boeing, Amazon, United Airlines, etc.
Not saying google isn't a monopoly, it classically is, same with facebook. But I wonder if Goog wasn't a majority "blue" company would he aggressively go after them. The problem is there are so many oligarchy's controlling industries. Chips, well its a two or three company game(intel, amd, ARM). Lets look at airlines, well its united, delta, american etc. Communications(cell phones), ATT, Verizon, Sprint/Tmobile. Ame…
Increasingly? When wasn't that true? You have to go back to pre Civil War, where the economy was heavily geographically split due to movement/transport limitations, which mostly voids the discussion (it was very much a local and regional, agriculture-heavy economy, with limited manufacturing and a very limited consumer goods market as we know it today; not very comparable to anything that exists now). Once you get near to or beyond the Civil War and firmly into the industrial era, the combinations begin essentially immediately and they dominate their segments rapidly. Vanderbilt got so rich by aggressively creating monopolies in his day, in transport. It was far more brutal than anything you can imagine today, in all respects including the options/alternatives that consumers had. From US Steel in 1901 to the few giant railroads to Standard Oil to American Tobacco to the couple remaining giant auto companies (eg GM, Ford, Chrysler) that survived that industry's shakeout in the following decades. Further, you had a small group of industrialists and financiers that cross-controlled everything regardless (and they had few laws limiting their behavior), as with eg Rockefeller heavily dictating terms with the railroads to crush his competition.
Leap forward in time: Sears, PAN-AM, IBM, General Electric, General Motors, Ford, AT&T, US Steel, US Rubber, Bethlehem Steel, Armour & Co., Kodak, Polaroid, a very small number of giant media companies like CBS, and so on.
Yesterday was dominated entirely by massive corporations. It doesn't matter what decade you select. Whether it's 1910, 1950, 1980, or 2020. It wasn't better in the past.
Markets always do this consolidating naturally. Your only option to prevent that is to use the government to prevent or interrupt it.