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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]

#51

Post by sfilargi »

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…

> Anyone can index the web

Most, if not all, websites will block your bot after a couple of request even if it respects robots.txt.

Also they seem to have different rules for GoogleBot and different for yours.

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

#52

Post by gambler »

dexterdog wrote: post #44
gambler wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But FB/Google can't force you to use their systems and enforce that action with an army (yet).

No one can force you to use money either. You can chose not to partake in any financial transactions and starve to death. According to the logic above, we just established that financial system is 100% voluntary.

You can chose not to ever fly on an airplane. According to the logic above, it's just a convenience. Nevertheless, people generally don't dismiss issues with air travel by saying that you can just chose to drive.

In reality, a lot of the systems you think are essential to your day-to-day life are technically opt-in. Except you cannot opt-out without cutting yourself off from the society.

Also, societies are not established by armies. They are established by social conventions with enough clout to become self-sustaining.

The Internet was originally established in a way that was very different from the current version of an offline society with its hyper-centralization and authorities. But the consolidation of services and infrastructure significantly changed that model.

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

#53

Post by BurningFrog »

I'm old enough to remember when IBM was the unbreakable monopolist that would rule the computer industry forever.

Then Microsoft was the unbreakable monopolist that would rule the computer industry forever.

Now it's apparently FAANG.

Just the fact that we have five monopolists should be enough to show thinking people that it's not a monopoly situation, if history isn't convincing enough.

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

#54

Post by mc32 »

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…

I think social is different from search. With search it’s hard to unseat an incumbent, but you can iteratively improve quality and grow a following.

Social requires network effects. Even Google with massive resources at its disposition could not compete with Facebook.

Now, from the advertisers’ PoV, Google is a essentially a monopoly in search, but not so much from and end user’s perspective.

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

#56

Post by SilasX »

gajeam wrote: post #50
maratd wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

"Microsoft spent more than a decade, investing tens of billions of dollars and absorbing an astonishing $12.4 billion in cumulative losses, to establish Bing as a credible competitor. It is cheaper and easier to build a manned space program than it is to build a modern search engine." - Matthew Hindman, "The Internet Trap", 2018 (p. 174)

Right, the issue was to make it credible. It was never difficult for someone to say "screw this, I'll use a different search engine instead" and be using it in minutes. Google would even find it for them!

The last sentence of the quote is false; only a small fraction of that money was spent on "building the search engine". Again, the relevant point is whether you can offer an alternative, which MS (and several others) have done with a fraction of that $12 billion. If it's difficult to offer something better because the top provider is legitimately the best at it, that's not the worrisome monopoly we should worry about.

Imagine the comparable investment to make a different OS that runs MS Word and getting a home user to use it instead of Windows/Word. Or running an alternate rail line from San Jose to San Francisco.

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

#58

Post by ben509 »

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…

Then Microsoft wasn't a traditional monopoly either.

Maybe the term should be "network monopoly" where the network effect is the mechanism by which they restrict the entry of competitors? That's very much true for social media companies.

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

#59

Post by dragonwriter »

SilasX wrote: post #14
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, whi…

> a monopoly should be judged by lock-in, not by raw market percentage

Monopolies are predominantly, in anti-trust law, judged by market (pricing) power, not raw market percentage. This directly relates to whether there is effective competition in the market—which may be slightly different than your question of whether buyers can switch to an alternative; it is more whether the alternative(s) are empirically substitutes rather than parallel non-substituting markets, whether or not buyers are able to switch.

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

#60

Post by gajeam »

nabla9 wrote: post #49

The comments in social media related to the issue get repeatedly stuck into the term monopoly usually in the title in the article. This happens again and again. Please everyone. Get over it. The context is monopoly power, market failures, unfair competition and antitrust law. Networked plaform technologies are very different from traditional monopolies: zero price, increasing returns, imperfect competition, spillover…

This view of "traditional monopolies" isn't actually that traditional. From the end of the Gilded Age to through the LBJ administration, antitrust law was focused on reducing market concentration, barriers of entry, and anti-competitive behavior. Only in the 60's did Robert Bork and the Chicago School start to chip away at this way of thinking. By the end of the Reagan administration, Bork's idea that a firm is only a monopoly if it reduces consumer welfare (aka raises prices.) [0]

Google and Facebook have taken full advantage of this new definition. They provide their products for free, acquire competitors without a peep from the FCC (Waze, Instagram, WhatsApp), invest heavily in corporate lobbyists, and have the fastest connections by colocating their data centers and building fiber optic cables. How can a new competitor be expected to lay undersea fiber optic cables?

[0] Tim Wu, "The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age", 2018

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