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'Google Is As Close To a Natural Monopoly As the Bell System Was In 1956' (promarket.org)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ProMarket: In terms of market share and profit margins, the big digital platforms, particularly Google and Facebook, enjoy an astounding level of dominance. Google, in effect the world's largest media company, has an 88 percent market share in search advertising. Facebook (including Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp) controls over 70 percent of social media on mobile devices. Together, the two firms received 85 cents of every new dollar spent in online advertising in the first quarter of 2016. Amazon has an over 70 percent share in the e-book market. Along with Apple and Microsoft, they are now the most valuable companies (in terms of market capitalization) in the world. The rise of digital platforms has had profound political, economic, and social effects, not least of which on the creators of content. While the internet brought immense benefits to consumers of content, the so-called "creative class" -- authors, journalists, filmmakers, musicians, artists -- has been particularly ravaged by the digital economy. This ravaging, and its roots in the monopolization of content delivery and data in the hands of a few digital giants, are at the heart of the new book Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by media scholar Jonathan Taplin. In the book, Taplin explores the way in which the internet came to be dominated by a handful of monopoly platforms, and the subsequent capturing of regulators that has since all but ensured their dominance would not be challenged in court. In an interview with ProMarket, Taplin said in response to a question: "I would say Google is as close to a natural monopoly as the Bell System was in 1956. If you came to me and said 'Hey, I want to start a company to compete with Google in search,' I would say you're out of your mind and don't waste your energy or your time or your money, there's just no way. Classic economics would say that if there's a business in which there are 35 percent net margins, that would attract a huge amount of new capital to capture some of that, and none of that has happened. That tells you there's something wrong."
People in 50s had to use Bell or no telephone system at all!
With google just the opposite. Mint makes it a struggle to set your search to google. They force Yahoo on you. MS products push Bing on you. I really have to go out of my way to use google.
People choose google, because they like it , not because of some monopoly influence.
Because it costs me a fortune to use Google and i have to lease a big black Google machine from the company to do it.
Why does on-line search need to be "regulated"?
Because you never can know when your hobby or innocent curiosity can get you locked up and used against you.
For instant if I want to know something I look it up, and I rarely think about the consequences. I have a strange fascination with nuclear weapons. Their history, how they are made, how they would be deployed, and under what circumstance would they be used. It's probably safe to say that outside someone with a security clearance I know almost everything that can be known.
Does this mean I have any incantation to build a nuclear device in my basement or blow up a city with one. Not in the slightest, but you can't tell that from my search history.
Without that protection out of context just about anything you search for can be used to hang you. Just because you google "how to excite 12 year old girls" doesn't mean you are cursing for jail bait.
I read at +2. If your post doesn't reach that level I will not see or respond to it.
Tell that to all the people that got Chrome shoved onto their system and made the default when they downloaded a completely unrelated program like CCleaner or Java. And how about how they bundle gapps into Android and make it impossible to remove...hmm, where did I see that before? Oh yeah windows and IE. They even ripped a page straight from the MSFT playbook as OEMs can't simply release Android devices free of gapps thanks to the nasty contracts Google pushes.
If MSFT was pulling that shit? People here would be screaming for an investigation and fines....hypocrisy thy name is Slashdot.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
You are not Google's Customer! The advertisers are. From the advertisers perspective Google is a monopolist. Excluding apps made by Facebook, adwords is the only place I can reasonably advertising on the general web. Yes there are other companies but the advertising industry favors one monopolist. If I create a website I will sign up with Google to get ads for my site because they are the biggest and it's just not worth my time using someone else. Since most websites only get ads from Google then advertisers only use Google.