do you have any evidence that your suggestions will actually improve the consumer experience or are you just suggesting killing businesses because of a gut feeling and some anti corporate sentiment?
>If we let monopolies take over, then the economy of the world will start to mirror the economies within these large corporations.
None of these companies can be said to be monopolies.
> We will gradually lose freedom of speech, in the same way that employees of large corporations don't have the freedom to say what they really think to their bosses.
If Google doesn't have an effective monopoly then I don't think I understand the word. The only search engine relavant to my search results is Google and I don't here to many people talking about optimizing their SEO for bing.
It's not necessarily illegal to be a monopoly, it's illegal to behave in certain anti-competitive ways. For example:
- Rockefeller made deals with the railroads that shipped Standard Oil to charge higher prices to other prospective oil shippers.
- Rockefeller bought any competitor that was undercutting him and raised its prices so it stopped being a threat.
- "Competing" firms met and drew up an agreement that neither would undercut the other on price.
- "Competing" firms met and drew up an agreement that certain regions belonged to Firm A, while other regions belonged to Firm B, and they would not enter each other's territory.
- Microsoft sabotaged its user experience for users who removed Internet Explorer to dissuade them from using Netscape.
- Microsoft sabotaged its APIs with the deliberate intention of breaking Netscape, Java, etc.
It's illegal to use your market power to beat competitors in ways that aren't: produce a better/cheaper product that people choose because it's better/cheaper.
- Google bought out it's only competitor to Google Wallet at the time (Softcard) and shut it down.
- Google just announced that it'll block competitors' ads on it's web browser by default. And charge people who use other ad blockers money.
- Google has a secret agreement with every mobile device manufacturer not named Apple to use their product on their terms, and seek their permission for all device releases. And set Google's already dominant software as default on every device.
(EDIT @closeparen, yes, market forces are part of the monopoly Google has constructed. It's impossible to succeed in building a non-Google OS phone. That's the point. Google doesn't have to prohibit them from doing anything they know the licensees can't succeed at doing.
As Androids are woefully insecure, all consumers are hurt by Google's monopoly. Android is an example of an inferior product succeeding through monopoly control.)
- Trying to own the mobile wallet space is mildly interesting, but only mildly, since there are so many offerings now.
- Do you have reason to believe that Android licensing stifles competition or hurts the consumer in any way? We see Android licensees put out phones with other OSes, though they're not popular and quickly die off. We see carriers that carry Android phones carry others.
- Getting dominance over the browser space and then using it to reinforce its dominance in advertising is probably a compelling antitrust case, and frankly I have no idea how their lawyers didn't tell them so.
It isn't just a company trying to abuse market advantage as tool to exploit consumers and crowd out the sector - it is if they are successful at it.
I don't feel locked in to Google Wallet. That is changing, since there are only three "blessed" mobile payment systems now in Samsung, Android, and Apple Pay (rather than what we should have, a standard mobile payment API handled by ISO). But before, Paypal and Amazon Checkout both provided payment solutions that were rivals, with significant market shares, to Google Wallet.
The ad blocking in Chrome is obviously anti-competitive, but it waits to be seen if Google has actual monopolistic power in the browser space where this change doesn't drive consumers to competitors. If the advertisers Google is trying to bully fight back by having their affiliates block Chrome, either those businesses die or Chrome loses market share. We will have to see what happens, but I generally think if consumers want to use a web product, they would get another browser to do so and stop using Chrome in the same way we got 40% of people to drop IE for Firefox.
And finally, Google also doesn't have any agreements with Amazon. That is why you have to manually download their app store APK, and why it doesn't have first class installation support as a generic app like the Play Store. But Amazon is also making their own Android devices without Gapps, and Samsung is in a position to at least try it themselves if they wanted to, since they have their own app suite as well. And all Google does is require that all their apps be installed if a manufacturer wants to include any of them - which while heavy handed isn't anticompetitive to do.
If anything, a real domain of monopoly exploit by Google is how they will punish companies they disagree with in SEO, when they do have an overwhelming majority of the search market, and it has been proven in the last 2 decades of business that consumers treat Google like gospel - if its not there, it might as well not exist. People don't try using alternative search engines if they don't find what they are looking for on Google.
> Android is an example of an inferior product succeeding through monopoly control.
Android is first mover advantage. It has the same vicious feedback loop that gives Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc their monopolies - they act as middle men to third party products and services, and by capturing the audience capture the mindshare of retailers. It doesn't matter if its user and app developers, users and websites, users and friends of them, or users and actual goods retailers - each one has dominance in their market because they have the mindshare.
I don't see how Google is being particularly abusive with how they run Android. Nobody has to use their Play Store, and nobody has to develop against the Play Services thus bonding their app to the Google Suite. It is just consumers want the apps on that store, so developers use the services and ignore the competition and create a self fulfilling prophecy of monopoly.
And I'm not arguing Android doesn't have a monopoly - just Google isn't really exploiting it by only requiring all their apps come if someone wants the Play Store. The OS itself is liberally licensed, and anyone could either reuse Dalvik or write their own implementation to run APKs. I'm not sure how you would legislate to avoid the natural monopolies caused by things like the Play Store, Google Search, Facebook, or Amazon.
Google is not a search company they are an advertising company. Their search product is a value add, it is the reason people go to google but it is also not what they sell. A business with a monopoly can raise the cost of their product to the price the market can bear. Google cannot raise the cost of their ads because advertisers will simply go to other ad platforms.
TLDR: Google is selling space on its website for advertisements. They do not have a monopoly on that. If they put their search behind a paywall Bing, Duckduckgo, etc will replace them.
You say that "a business with a monopoly can raise the cost of their product to the price the market can bear" which seems to be exactly what Google has achieved with their competitive pricing model. If they charged more then they would lose buisiness. If they charged less they'd be leaving money on the table. This leaves no room for a competitor and therefore it is a monopoly, both in theory and in practice no matter how hard you want to argue against it.
While Google monetizes its core web properties such as google, gmail, and youtube via a closed advertising system. That doesn't mean the worth of the company is held in AdWords. If Google decided to shutter AdWords and use a third party the third party would still need to pay billions per year for exclusivity.
However, Google does leverage their ad business into non-google properties via vertical integration eg. I can buy ads on CNN via AdWords but I can't buy ads on Google search from DataXu or other DSPs.
We can't measure it perfectly but there exist statistics that we can at least say approximate it. One of which is price and currently there are price wars occurring all the time between the tech giants.
i believe that happy customers would count as valid evidence.
when i use google or amazon, im usually pretty happy with the service they provide.
when i have to stand at a walmart cashier for half an hour while the lady has to yell for the manager because she needs to issue a $1.20 refund, im not as happy.
when I have to go to the library of alexandria to find a piece of infomration that im looking for but then they tell me that it burned down 2000 odd years ago, im not as happy.
google was not a monopoly when it became popular. it was the idiot 12th search engine that nobody needed.
i get what youre saying, but its pretty obvious why a company gets big. its either holding some form of monopoly or people want it. there are not many other options to be honest.
you dont become the most popular car manufacturer by producing a bullshit product that people neither need nor want.
besides, why is comcast even a negative example? why did you pick that? its because you KNOW FOR A FACT that everyone hates comcast. even I know that. and i have nothing to do with america. people hate comcast. that may as well be a dictionary example sentence for the word "hate". how do we know that everyone hates comcast? because people say so every single day. just measure that. if you want to know whether a company is loved or hated, just ask their customers.
>If we let monopolies take over, then the economy of the world will start to mirror the economies within these large corporations.
None of these companies can be said to be monopolies.
> We will gradually lose freedom of speech, in the same way that employees of large corporations don't have the freedom to say what they really think to their bosses.
This is the slipperiest slope I've ever seen.