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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."
Yes, they do have hundreds of thousands of rack-mounted servers in data centers around the world, but so does Amazon, and companies can rent virtual servers in them.
AT&T provided universal point-to-point phone service. There was just no way to compete against that until a Federal judge broke up the company in the early '80s (sure, the Internet with VOIP might've done the job, but that came more than 10 years later).
Who's to say that Google's search bar and query results, accompanied by targeted ads, will be good enough for the public ten or even five years from now. There's plenty of room for innovation and entrepreneurship. I'll bet Jeff Bezos has more than one pet project aimed squarely at Google search right now.
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.
The defining characteristic of a monopoly is not market share, but lack of choice. Google dominates search, and I use it, but I could switch to Bing in 10 seconds. Likewise for advertisers, although Google has a large market share, they don't charge more per eyeball, because advertisers can easily switch.
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.
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.
Honestly, I'd be surprised if you could even name anybody who has had this happen to them and was upset about it. If they were really that bothered by it, they could have easily avoided it. And even then, for Windows 10 users, Microsoft resets edge back to the default browser basically every 6 months (along with a bunch of other settings, like resetting Bing back to the default search,) and in order to change Chrome to the default browser, it takes three steps, and during each step Microsoft nags you to stick with Edge.
Yet in spite of all of this, a majority of people opt to make Chrome their default browser. You can't even argue that they were somehow tricked into doing that because the way Microsoft redesigned things, there's no way that it can be anything other than a deliberate choice.
And how about how they bundle gapps into Android and make it impossible to remove
That's not quite true. As of Android 7, Google deliberately made it so that most bundled apps are moved to the user partition after first boot and can be subsequently deleted. The only ones that can't be deleted are the ones that are integral to the operation of other apps. For example, Google Maps is integral to the operation of apps like Strava or Endomondo, and thus can't be fully removed, though it can be disabled so that the main app is inaccessible (and likewise the icon isn't available in the app drawer.)
If MSFT was pulling that shit? People here would be screaming for an investigation and fines....hypocrisy thy name is Slashdot.
Very very false. Unlike Google, Microsoft bundles many apps that outright can't be removed or even have their icon nixed from the start menu. Examples include onedrive, onenote, cortana, skype, groove music, edge, maps, xbox, and a few others I can't think of at the moment.
Some other annoying things that Microsoft does and Google doesn't include (as mentioned above) resetting all of your application defaults to Microsoft's applications after every major patch (roughly every 6 months) and including advertisements basically everywhere. Lock screen? Ad. Solitaire? Ad. Start menu? Ad. Explorer? Ad (namely OneDrive ads.) And that's not even getting into the bundled adware/trialware like Solitaire, Candy Crush, etc.
Google includes neither ads nor adware in Android. Granted, some OEMs do, but on Windows the OEMs do much worse than that, like superfish for example, or how basically every single one of them includes trial antivirus software of some kind that constantly nags you to buy it while at the same time making you even more vulnerable to malware.