91–100 of 128 posts
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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Replace YouTube with network TV vs cable in the early days. There is a way past YouTube but people must be willing to adapt and/or take the hit building the next thing. Most of the best TV shows have been from network and especially the premium ones like HBO, Showtime, and now Netflix. However, it took many years to get here and most people probably can't afford to compete without net neutrality.
Nothing you mentioned is a replacement for Youtube, where on demand I can get a video on replacing the clutch on my car or a quick tutorial on promises in node.js
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Google's original infrastructure was their main advantage, this is quickly being eroded. Ten years down the rode its not unreasonable to think that the costs to join the search business as a new competitor have gone way down.
I suspect that my increasing dissatisfaction with Google as a search engine may be a byproduct of the arms race against spammers; maybe it doesn't easily find good niche content the way I remember it doing 10 years ago because the signals of 10 years ago are too easily gamed. If that's true, then no new search engine is ever going to be as impressive as Google was when it first arrived. Similar to how no new antibiotic is going to be as impressive as penicillin originally was. The pathogenic elements have evolved too much resistance to permit the same "miracle product" experience again.
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 this is the sticking point. A lot of the time this loyalty is not real. Many people would happily move elsewhere if the service was as good or better. The trouble is, every other alternative is basically doing the same thing as Google and FB, so there's little incentive to move.
However, it's clear that a monopolizing aspect exists because for every email I write, there is (probably) a very high chance that google will read it, because it ends up on their servers.
For every website I visit (if I disable uBlock, of course), there is a very high chance that I'll be subjected to FB tracking.
So, although these companies are not a 'classical' monopoly, I think it's fair to state that they are definitely monopolizing our usage of the internet. The real problem is that all the other 'wannabe' alternatives aren't all that much better, with (perhaps) the exception of the Search Engine space (ddg, startpage).
At this point, Google in many cases offers the best service: DuckDuckGo is good, but Google is better. It is so good that it indexes the CIA's stuff: https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/416215-cia-operations... This is without even considering google dorks, possibly one of the most powerful tools infosec researchers (or even average people) have to refine queries. In the case of Facebook, it offers the best produc…
It would be much more difficult to displace Facebook than MySpace — it never reached 100 million unique users per month, but Facebook is over 2 billion.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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…
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…
This isn't the 90s where anyone can crawl the web without countermeasures.
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.
It's a ratchet.
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…
"Traditionally," crossing over a farmer's land entitled the farmer to extract a fee from you, no matter what altitude you crossed over at. The law had to change once the technological reality changed.
In this case, the supply of a good or service (social networking, webpage indexing and searching) are not controlled by Facebook and Google
I think this is a bit of a sham. As you observe, the mere existence of website pages isn't worth anything by itself.
What Facebook and Google have is massive, large scale user loyalty.
Human attention, on timescales measured in hours or days, is still a finite resource. Human attention, measured on a per-capita basis is still a finite resource. If you just call it "loyalty" and make some kind of claim of market sacredness to your hard earned spoils, you're just obfuscating the finite nature of the resource the actual product is based on.
Despite alternatives existing (Bing, Mastadon, DuckDuckGo, Myspace, etc.), users are voluntarily choosing to use Google and Facebook. This is not a monopoly, IMO.
You're actually just begging for a special exception for network effect based monopolies.