401–410 of 502 posts
IMHO they're not a monopoly, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> On the advertising front, Google is no longer the only game in town, so by definition not a monopoly. Who are their competitors (I've not heard of one that isn't directly tied to a platform (a'la facebook))? How is the market segmented between Google and their competitors? If google had, as an example, 80% of the market share, it could still legitimately be considered to be a monopoly, even if it had 1000 competito…
For one thing, Internet advertising is still not a majority of all ad spending. Google is estimated to control about 1/3rd of the online market, Facebook about 1/4.
Internet advertising may not be a majority of all ad spending, but Google is an internet ad company, not a general ad company. It would be like arguing the old phone company wasn't a monopoly because plenty of communication was still by mail or in person.
IMHO they're not a monopoly, at least not in the traditional sense of the word. 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…
"Essential facility"?
This came up in the railroad era, the first big antitrust issue. Railroads were in a strong enough position to push up shipping rates. And push towns, and sometimes states, around. Pressure for antitrust action came from their customers, especially farmers, not from other railroads.
That led to the Interstate Commerce Commission and considerable price regulation.
A take: monopoly in tech is good. Because Google/Amazon/FB have so much money they can do things that push tech forward as a whole. Think about the revolutionary improvements Google has made towards data centers, AWS, and all the research/open source contributions these companies have done. Unlike other monopolies (telecom, defense contracting) etc. where the monopoly is used to stagnate innovation (see Comcast being…
Google forces you to work solely with google, E.g (from the antitrust investigation of the EC:
Google required direct partners to exclusively use Google's AdSense and could not engage with Google's competitors;
It is actively disadvantaging the competition:
>Google does not apply its system of penalties, a predefined set of parameters to lower the placement of shopping results, to its own Google Shopping results as it did to other competitors.
>yet they aren't "liberal"/"blue" companies, so there are no lawsuits
And this is off the track in my opinion. In Europe Google also has problems with the European Union, do you think they are liberal or conservative on your scale? Google deserves some punishment for how it behaves. It is doing actively damage to society. Do not evil has long be gone.
This is going to give bad points again, but may I say that I find the amount of polarization in your country distasteful? And that is an understatement. I think you shouldn't divide your country into two compartments, you are all in the ride together.
It will weaken you in the long term and your country is actively exporting these ideas. So in Europe polarization is also growing. It is a dangerous matter thinking into sides like this.
It sounds like red is evil to you and blue is good. Watch out for that. Watch out for that.
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…
No, no, no. Amazon disrupted the grip that publishing houses had on publishing, they have democratized writing. Publishers and bookstores had restricted markets that were dictated by a few big publishing houses. Amazon disrupted that, which has lead to far more books being written. Books that have been self-published. How on earth is that considered a failing? Bookstores are no longer viable, because Amazon has obvia…
Walmart and Costco do it too, should that it be banned when customers get the product at a cheaper cost?
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…
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not a fan of creative destruction in the software sphere, personally. In a lot of sectors, sure. I'm all for someone building a better car. What benefit does mass competition in the software service space give me? How many bespoke APIs am I expected to integrate against to build something useful? Different for difference's sake is the curse of our industry.
Everyone making a bespoke api is not the same as someone making a better car. Key word is "better" The issue is that a lot of people talk up "innovation" in the tech industry, that isn't. For every person who makes a better car, lots of people make the same or worse cars. As a random example, which format would you rather have your api serialization format be in: ASN, XML or Json? I for one am glad that innovation ma…
ha, obvs protobuffers. [hides from thrown tomatoes]
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…
But, Android ships with chrome installed and set as the default browser, with Google as default search engine. And 99% of customers will never even think to touch those settings. You can't break into a market that most people don't ever realize exists.
Android isn't iOS where you're not allowed to replace the browser at all.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Amazon probably has more shareholders today than the total number of people who have ever owned a share of a local bookstore.
This. Most booksellers could have just sold their bookstores years ago and bought shares of Amazon and done far better because they simply can't provide a faster, cheaper and better experience for their customers than Amazon can.
That's debatable. If I want a specific book, sure. But Amazon simply cannot replicate the experience of browsing a bookstore looking for an interesting book to read. I cannot physically hold the book in my hands, flip through it's pages, maybe read a few excerpts, etc. And if I'm buying a used book, I can't inspect the actual condition myself before purchasing.
I don't have a problem with this. But I wonder why there isn't similar willpower to pursue, say, telecoms, banks, Monsanto, Luxxotica, Disney, and the like. Why is it just big tech?
The biggest needing breakups are:
- ISPs / telecoms
- Banks
- Food supply
ISPs / telecom should be first, the 2017 push to remove net neutrality even with clear violations [1], privacy protections and focus on ad networks [2], data caps, throttling, prioritization and more are unforgivable. The network is a utility, it needs strong liability behind that. I'd rather the lines be run by power companies and in many places like Phoenix SRP runs all the fiber anyways [3]. Cox only ran lines when Google Fiber was here. All Cox does is overload nodes and upload is severely limited as well as prioritization is going overboard and ending up with dropped packets and a horrible QoE. While these systems have a decent QoS, the QoE is going down immensely. There are lots more things they are doing like trying to get their modems in while having access to remotely install firmware on approved but not rented modems and limiting/throttling by device when you get their shared modem/router that they can see every device.
"too big to fail banks" next which are a national security issue almost at this point. Mind blowing after the Great Recession that we let the banks handle this stimulus as a gatekeeper. The GR bubble was caused by mortgage backed securities that went into cause a credit crunch. Now we got whistleblowers coming out about commercial mortgage backed securities [4]. It is going to get bad.
With the pandemic, now the food supply has been exposed as too consolidated. Even hedge funds are saying it, when hedge funds are worried you should be worried as these are the wealth extractors [5].
Harvard Business Review recently raised the alarm about too much consolidation called "The High Price of Efficiency" and how there should be a 'rethinking efficiency' to reduce concentration [6].
> "Superefficient businesses create the potential for social disorder."
You can have too much "efficiency", it leads to stagnation and monopolies/oligopolies which stop innovating and turn to rent-seeking. Ultimately it leads to less innovation, less products, less jobs, monoculture, higher prices and missed opportunities when there is efficient competition but not super efficient markets. We need companies doing the same things and finding new ways to do things otherwise product development and research and development stop. The sales/marketing/finance takes over then from the product/engineering/creative people and we all lose.
Here's a great quick point by Steve Jobs about product stagnation and the managers/business side [7] and how they can run amok if not controlled to allow value creation to continue, and how monopolies or problems that arise when only the business/managers are in charge.
> It turns out the same thing can happen in technology companies that get monopolies, like IBM or Xerox. If you were a product person at IBM or Xerox, so you make a better copier or computer. So what? When you have monopoly market share, the company's not any more successful.
> So the people that can make the company more successful are sales and marketing people, and they end up running the companies. And the product people get driven out of the decision making forums, and the companies forget what it means to make great products. The product sensibility and the product genius that brought them to that monopolistic position gets rotted out by people running these companies that have no conception of a good product versus a bad product.
> They have no conception of the craftsmanship that's required to take a good idea and turn it into a good product. And they really have no feeling in their hearts, usually, about wanting to really help the customers.
The market is like a garden. The seeds and smaller plants need help, the overgrown and large plants should be harvested and culled back so it doesn't take over the garden and then the midsize plants flourish. Our market garden is in a state of overgrowth and the rest of the crops can't survive.
What happens when the overgrowth is taken over and efficiently worked out competition and created stagnation? How will there be competition in an oligopoly that is no longer US owned? It is a national security issue as well as a fair market matter.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_S...
[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/05/congress-repealing-our...
[3] https://srptelecom.com/darkfiber/networkmap.aspx
[4] https://www.propublica.org/article/whistleblower-wall-street...
[5] https://www.marketwatch.com/story/hedge-fund-blames-us-meat-...
[6] https://hbr.org/2019/01/rethinking-efficiency
[7] https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-on-why-innovation...