241–250 of 260 posts
Its not 2004 so you shouldn't be as impressionable as a child any longer. If you are fawning over a corporation's motto you are playing life by an ineffective set of rules. But .... now that I think about it, scratch that, maybe you'll be interested in being part of my Amway downline.
Ma Bell's monopoly has never been "natural". It has been enforced by FCC, ever since FCC was formed for that specific purpose in 1934. Even before that, ICC through the Kingsbury Commitment had adopted an ill-considered and unjustified hands-off policy with respect to Ma Bell's anticompetitive actions.
Funny how just about every country in the world ended up with a telephone monopoly.
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There are also instances in which Google has played not particularly fairly—releasing Chrome-only products such as Google Earth that require NaCl, for example.
Only allowing redirects to be seen by Google Analytics, no competing analytics tools.
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I think this is a really interesting point. In a capitalist/free-market situation, no one cares if you start a business and fail. Competition is seen as a good thing. But how can you blame a company for winning in its domain against its competitors? Also, what does it mean to 'abuse' a monopoly position. I don't think its practical to argue that Google doesn't have a monopoly on internet search[1]. When your product…
> Also, what does it mean to 'abuse' a monopoly position. IANAL, but there is a legally precise meaning. (Of course, lawyers will still argue over whether a particular behavior meets the definition.) But it's basically, you have a monopoly in X, and you try to use that monopoly to gain you market share in Y. For example, let's say Microsoft has a monopoly in operating systems. That's OK, nothing wrong with it, becaus…
> Now, what I'm hearing people complain about is that Google uses Chrome to maintain its monopoly in search.
I think this isn't any different than IE or Edge promoting MSN or Bing. I wouldn't say its sleazy, just that they (Microsoft, Google, whoever) is trying to tie their products together to make an ecosystem. Like how iPhones come shipped with Safari (another Apple product). But then again, IANAL either.
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A monopoly is a seller with few or no competing sellers. In many cases this is bad for consumers, so many governments have taken steps to dismantle some monopolies or ameliorate their bad effects. It's not clear that "natural monopoly" is a category that has any members, but the theory is that a natural monopoly is a monopoly such that dismantling it would have other bad effects that would be worse than the direct ba…
> the theory is that a natural monopoly is a monopoly such that dismantling it would have other bad effects that would be worse than the direct bad effects of the monopoly Hm? That's not what it means. Natural Monopoly actually has a very clear Economics 101 definition: " [a]n industry in which multi-firm production is more costly than production by a monopoly "[1]. Or, paraphrased, a natural monopoly is one where fi…
The interesting part to me is that in terms of cost a monopolistic company might be the most effective. The problem is just that cost and price don't have much to do with each other. A monopoly provider is unlikely to actually provide low prices unless he knows competition could emerge.
Having two parallel infrastructure might be less efficent in terms of cost, but could still be more efficent in terms of prices to the consumer.
Both politicans and economist have argued that just having government step in could provide low cost and low price.
I think this assumtion is flawed. Having multible infastuctures adds layers of competition that even with government services or regulation are hard to achive. How well you utilise your infrastructre, what sort of payment structure are costumers provided with, quality of service, how for and in what direction do you grow your network and so on.
Government stepping in can maybe solve the short term problem, but if think about the long term, letting this market be free of a government regulated monopoly procides the chance that another company can come in, either starting in places where the monopoly has not reached and expand from there or start where the consumers hurt the most and try to expand from there.
I think the answer here is probebly differnt for every industry, laying a cable and a sewage system have very different cost structures.
The most important thing about these regulation seems to be that you never exclude competition explicitly. So you could regulate a infrastructure provider and give him price ceilings or something.
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A monopoly is a seller with few or no competing sellers. In many cases this is bad for consumers, so many governments have taken steps to dismantle some monopolies or ameliorate their bad effects. It's not clear that "natural monopoly" is a category that has any members, but the theory is that a natural monopoly is a monopoly such that dismantling it would have other bad effects that would be worse than the direct ba…
The assumption around natural monopolies is that they're the inevitable result of the economic dynamics of an industry. Therefore if you carve things up to force competition, the theory goes, you're going to increase capital requirements overall and therefore prices to consumers. It's also fairly clear that at least over long enough time horizons there aren't many natural monopolies.
There is a nice private solution to this, and this sort of thing is not talked about enough.
Imagen we have two companies, both are ISP with their own infrastructure. Then because of other reason a new expensive infrastructure project is needed. These two could ban together and form a new organisation (non-provit or a club) that economises on the infrastructure but provides access and price garanties to both companies and maybe even sell access capacity to third parties.
The differnce to a normal company providing infrastructure is that the costumers of that company always need to be afraid of price raises. Once you have this club situation you essentially have one infrastructure, but you avoid monopoly pricing because competitive game has moved to a higher abstraction. This would provide very low cost and very low price to consumers.
If you apply a regulatory system as soon as you think there is a natural monopoly the industry will almost certantly stagnate.
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"Chrome was entirely built to be leveraged to force people to use Google Search" That grossly simplifies the origin and existence of Chrome. While it's true that Google is the default omnibox search (I'd argue that "people don't change their default search engine" is a really weak way to "force" people to use a browser---too weak to justify building a whole browser by itself), you have to remember the ecosystem of br…
While Google may have found other uses for it as well, even pro-Google Sundar Pichai interviews and such all cite Google Toolbar, and then it's successor, Google Chrome, as Pichai's wild successes in expanding the spread of Google Search, and essentially why he is now the CEO. And that the whole selling point for Chrome was as a hedge against IE hypothetically blocking their toolbar.
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Local politics might be bad, but it'd be far worse to have it run by Google. They'd never pick up your customer support calls; they'd be more concerned with using ML to figure out when you sh*t and when you shower (valuable data for advertisers, you see). Also they'd randomly remove you from the network all the time for no apparent reason.
I see where you're coming from (and your comment is very funny) however my experience with Google Fiber as an ISP and Google's Project Fi as an MVNO is pretty much the opposite. They've been great, including customer service. And those are utilities, essentially, no? That's the whole argument behind Net Neutrality, that ISPs are providing a utility.
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Only allowing redirects to be seen by Google Analytics, no competing analytics tools.
Can you elaborate?