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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]

#3

Post by umvi »

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 network and Google/Facebook aren't going to crush you with lawsuits or some other nefarious tactic to maintain their position (AFAIK). Entry of new producers of these services is not prevented or highly restricted. New social networks and search engines pop up all the time.

What Facebook and Google have is massive, large scale user loyalty. Despite alternatives existing (Bing, Mastadon, DuckDuckGo, Myspace, etc.), users are voluntarily choosing to use Google and Facebook. This is not a monopoly, IMO.

I think we need a new term for this situation.

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

#5

Post by azinman2 »

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.

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

#7

Post by thwy12321 »

These companies could disappear over night. Is being a monopoly for a decade really a big deal? It's completely over hyped how much control they have, for now they are dominant, but five years from now its entirely possible that they arent. Also, they have produced so much for the world of technology, essentially creating all of the big data infrastructure technology, and (bare with me here) react which is having a material impact on the terribleness of front end frameworks. The deep learning revolution was started by cheap compute which sprang out of google. This whole monopoly business is so overplayed.

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

#9

Post by thwy12321 »

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.

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.
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