Google has a natural monopoly. I am a big supporter of penalties for monopoly abuse but not all monopolies are bad. They do all need thorough oversight and regulation. But having a monopoly is not strictly bad. The illegal actions done to maintain them are strictly bad. They should be allowed to come and go as the markets demand.
A "natural monopoly" is something like the water or sewage or electricity provider where is isn't sensible to physically run more than one set of pipes into everyone's house. That dynamic doesn't apply at all to search engines.
Monopolies that are allowed to exist (e.g. last mile telecom, utilities) are usually very tightly regulated. Probably to the extent that Google would prefer to be broken up instead.
I'm not sure you could break Google up in a meaningful way without destroying it. Considering the majority of their revenue is search how could you divide up search?
I'm not sure that's the case; Apple isn't as dominant in share of any intuitively-described market as, say, Google and search ads, but a more relevant test for monopoly is pricing power, and I wouldn't be surprised if they in fact have that for some of their products/services.
Pricing power isn't defined by descriptive categories, it is defined by behavior (whether they can increase prices without sales moving to competitors.)
It's a test that exists because there are an infinite number of ways to construct named categories of products, which can create any appearance you want, but none of them tell you if things in that category are genuinely competing with each other.
The person I was responding to wasn't talking about pricing power, they were talking about monopolies. Apple isn't anywhere near a monopoly in any commodity or service. In fact, they compete with the near monopolies of Microsoft and Google.
Also, being a monopoly isn't in and of itself illegal, it's abusing your monopoly position to harm competition. You have to be a monopoly first.
Pricing power is a test for whether a monopoly exists; it tests for actual practical competition rather than the presence of other participants in a decriptive category which may not actually compete in practice.
It may be a test but having pricing power doesn't mean they're a monopoly. They have pricing power because they deliver more consumer surplus in their products than what they capture. Even in the case of the iPhone business having rising ASPs most of that has come from segmentation of the customer base into higher end models rather than simple price increases.
You don't need to have a monopoly to have pricing power, your product just needs to be differentiated enough.
