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Google and Facebook are monopolies. Does it matter? [audio]

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Re: Google and Facebook are monopolies. Does it matter? [audio]

#11

Post by belorn »

umvi wrote: post #3

If 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…

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 pop up all the time but with the captured market being what it is there is a huge wall for both producers and viewers to switch. A better video site have a hard time to compete with youtube, not based on merit but based on market capture.

Re: Google and Facebook are monopolies. Does it matter? [audio]

#12

Post by ravenstine »

umvi wrote: post #3

If 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…

> Traditional monopolies "control supply of a good or service, and where the entry of new producers is prevented or highly restricted."

It might not be prevented or restricted in the traditional sense, but the barrier to relevant market share has become nearly impossible to cross. The alternatives you cite, besides maybe DDG, aren't serious contenders to Google or Facebook.

Now, perhaps they would be if people paid to use those services, then they'd be more likely to pick and choose between the selection because they're going to want to pay for the right one for them, not necessarily the one that everyone else is using. But because the internet is largely ad-funded, hence nobody has to pay for most immaterial things, they're free to flock to wherever the crowd may be. That's why it's particularly bad that Facebook and Google are such "monopolies", even if the word doesn't exactly fit the situation. To compete with these services, you can't just appeal to a person's sensibilities within a market. DDG might be an exception, but it hasn't been around long enough for us to tell whether it's just a fad or will be quickly stamped out by something else.

Re: Google and Facebook are monopolies. Does it matter? [audio]

#14

Post by SilasX »

umvi wrote: post #3

If 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, which have those kinds network/lockin effects, not search engines or (as was in the news recently) retail sales of organic foods (where it's easy for numerous grocery stores to enter the market if they wish)[2].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18394628

[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08...

Re: Google and Facebook are monopolies. Does it matter? [audio]

#15

Post by oconnor663 »

belorn wrote: post #11
umvi wrote: post #3

If 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…

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…

> not based on merit but based on market capture

I'm not sure about that distinction. Users prefer something about YouTube compared to it's competitors. That's merit, even if it's not the particular merits that content creators would prefer.

Re: Google and Facebook are monopolies. Does it matter? [audio]

#16

Post by pjmlp »

hartator wrote: post #13

What matter are laws that are making harder to compete with them. Thanks to GDPR, you’ll probably never see a fb competitor emerge in Europe for example.

Which is a good thing.

As for FB itself, once upon a time Hi5 and MySpace were all that matter for social networking.

Also many European social networking sites like Xing are doing pretty ok, in spite of GDPR.

Re: Google and Facebook are monopolies. Does it matter? [audio]

#17

Post by ProAm »

umvi wrote: post #3

If 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…

> where the entry of new producers is prevented or highly restricted.

Is there a term for when a new entry can be easily killed if the other party simply decides to duplicate their product/service/offering? Google and FB do not prevent entry, but they sure can kill new entrants easily with funding. See Instagram implementing 'Stories' which killed Vine. See Twitter Periscope killing Merekat, etc.....

Re: Google and Facebook are monopolies. Does it matter? [audio]

#18

Post by umvi »

azinman2 wrote: post #5
umvi wrote: post #3

If 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…

It’s kind of a rich get richer situation. The cost and difficulty of competing against Google for search, for example, requires just gigantic amounts of resources, time, and research. Meanwhile a Google has had all 3 of those for years and years now. To beat them at their own game requires much of the same thing, unless the answer isn’t based on crawling the web and attempting to parse natural language.

There are lots of products and services that require massive amounts of resources, time, and research in order to compete. Like spacecraft, military aircraft, pharmaceuticals, etc. Basically you can only compete on those fronts if you are a billionare/huge corporation. It would be very hard for a new player to compete with SpaceX given their head start. That doesn't mean SpaceX has a monopoly on spacecraft, you can always buy a Russian rocket.

A monopoly (in my mind) would be more like Comcast. Since they've lobbied for laws in a lot of places that make it extremely hard to dig up the ground and put in new telecomm infrastructure, they completely control the supply of terrestrial internet service and there are literally no other ISP choices in many places. Thus, your only alternatives are non-terrestrial ISPs (LTE, satellite, etc).

Re: Google and Facebook are monopolies. Does it matter? [audio]

#19

Post by gaius »

oconnor663 wrote: post #15
belorn wrote: post #11

Earlier 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…

> not based on merit but based on market capture I'm not sure about that distinction. Users prefer something about YouTube compared to it's competitors. That's merit, even if it's not the particular merits that content creators would prefer.

Users prefer something about YouTube compared to it's competitors

That something is the vast amount of copyrighted content...

Re: Google and Facebook are monopolies. Does it matter? [audio]

#20

Post by jhall1468 »

ravenstine wrote: post #12
umvi wrote: post #3

If 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…

> Traditional monopolies "control supply of a good or service, and where the entry of new producers is prevented or highly restricted." It might not be prevented or restricted in the traditional sense, but the barrier to relevant market share has become nearly impossible to cross. The alternatives you cite, besides maybe DDG, aren't serious contenders to Google or Facebook. Now, perhaps they would be if people paid t…

The reason Google remains market dominant is because nobody is offering alternatives that the larger consumer market cares about, including DDG. People are more than willing to sell themselves to advertisers for a good experience, and that's exactly what Google provides.

If some search engine came and produced vastly superior results to Google, people would absolutely switch. That's how Google came to power in the first place: their results were just better.

Not sure what we can be expected to do. Split up Facebook and everyone will eventually flock to 1 maybe two services. Split up Google and you take away the majority of "free to use" apps because those are dependent on Google's advertising.

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