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> markets in which there are only 1-2 possible good providers are not, in fact markets at all First, it's completely false that there are only 1-2 possible goo

> markets in which there are only 1-2 possible good providers are not, in fact markets at all First, it's completely false that there are only 1-2 possible good search providers, given that there are already several good search providers that exist today. You may think Google is better than Bing or DuckDuckGo[0] or Baidu, but there's no arguing that they aren't good. And the barriers to entry for search are about as low as possible. Google can't stop you from writing your own web crawler, and there's no law preventing you from indexing pages yourself. Yes, that requires time and money, but so does every large market opportunity. [0] No, this is not redundant, because DuckDuckGo does use its own crawlers in addition to the search results it gets from Bing.

vertex-four 10y ago
> You may think Google is better than Bing or DuckDuckGo[0] or Baidu, but there's no arguing that they aren't good. That's not the point. As long as it's nearly impossible for another company to become market leader, there isn't competition there in any meaningful sense. Competition would mean that Bing or DuckDuckGo or Baidu could reasonably overtake Google. One of the only reasons Bing has any market share at all is that their search engine comes on IE by default, and Baidu is primarily used in China because China is protectionist. DuckDuckGo is tiny in comparison. EDIT: The issue here is that offloading costs to someone other than the consumer - in this case, advertisers - distorts the market so that there's little/no reason to use the second-best search engine. If people had to pay what their searches cost them, some people might realise they could save money by not going for the top option, and we'd have reasonable competition with people choosing between alternatives on multiple axes. This is what keeps, for example, the zipper market functioning.
- baddox 10y ago
  > As long as it's nearly impossible for another company to become market leader, there isn't competition there in any meaningful sense. Competition would mean that Bing or DuckDuckGo or Baidu could reasonably overtake Google. That's taking things a bit too far. I'm not aware of any widespread legal or economic definition of "competition" that requires a reasonable chance for multiple firms to become the market leaders. I think that a market can be healthy and competitive even if there is one firm with a solid, say, 75% of the market and no imminent threat to its position as market leader.
- superuser2 10y ago
  I don't disagree, but it doesn't seem to follow from "the search engine business isn't fair" to "okay, then nobody can operate a search engine" or even worse "you can have a search engine, but if you make it too good, we'll shut you down."
  - vertex-four 10y ago
    Sure. Under current law, it's not illegal, and there's nothing any Government can do about it. In an ideal world, though, what do we do with things that are not markets? In lots of cases, we artificially create a market by opening up some of the lower-level infrastructure. In the case of ISPs in the UK, we forced BT to split off the part of their business that owns and sells access to much of their physical infrastructure, allowing anyone to run an ISP. In Google's case, it might be worth forcing them to open some of the data they have to competitors. Of course, given that Google isn't actually tied to any specific country, that's impossible in practice. But what else is reasonable to do with businesses that exist in markets so distorted that they no longer function as markets?
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  Actually, the test for market power is pricing power. Which Google, I would argue, doesn't have with search: they charge $0 for it, and would drastically lose volume if they increased the price. They may have pricing power.for search advertising, though.
Spooky23 10y ago
The barriers to entry depend on a vibrant network of content providers. Google can't stop you from crawling the web, but Facebook would love to.
rtpg 10y ago
Kinda irrelevant to your point, but I heard that Baidu is really quite bad at search.

vertex-four 10y ago

> You may think Google is better than Bing or DuckDuckGo[0] or Baidu, but there's no arguing that they aren't good. That's not the point. As long as it's nearly impossible for another company to become market leader, there isn't competition there in any meaningful sense. Competition would mean that Bing or DuckDuckGo or Baidu could reasonably overtake Google. One of the only reasons Bing has any market share at all is that their search engine comes on IE by default, and Baidu is primarily used in China because China is protectionist. DuckDuckGo is tiny in comparison. EDIT: The issue here is that offloading costs to someone other than the consumer - in this case, advertisers - distorts the market so that there's little/no reason to use the second-best search engine. If people had to pay what their searches cost them, some people might realise they could save money by not going for the top option, and we'd have reasonable competition with people choosing between alternatives on multiple axes. This is what keeps, for example, the zipper market functioning.

baddox 10y ago
> As long as it's nearly impossible for another company to become market leader, there isn't competition there in any meaningful sense. Competition would mean that Bing or DuckDuckGo or Baidu could reasonably overtake Google. That's taking things a bit too far. I'm not aware of any widespread legal or economic definition of "competition" that requires a reasonable chance for multiple firms to become the market leaders. I think that a market can be healthy and competitive even if there is one firm with a solid, say, 75% of the market and no imminent threat to its position as market leader.
superuser2 10y ago
I don't disagree, but it doesn't seem to follow from "the search engine business isn't fair" to "okay, then nobody can operate a search engine" or even worse "you can have a search engine, but if you make it too good, we'll shut you down."
- vertex-four 10y ago
  Sure. Under current law, it's not illegal, and there's nothing any Government can do about it. In an ideal world, though, what do we do with things that are not markets? In lots of cases, we artificially create a market by opening up some of the lower-level infrastructure. In the case of ISPs in the UK, we forced BT to split off the part of their business that owns and sells access to much of their physical infrastructure, allowing anyone to run an ISP. In Google's case, it might be worth forcing them to open some of the data they have to competitors. Of course, given that Google isn't actually tied to any specific country, that's impossible in practice. But what else is reasonable to do with businesses that exist in markets so distorted that they no longer function as markets?
dragonwriter 10y ago
Actually, the test for market power is pricing power. Which Google, I would argue, doesn't have with search: they charge $0 for it, and would drastically lose volume if they increased the price. They may have pricing power.for search advertising, though.

Spooky23 10y ago

The barriers to entry depend on a vibrant network of content providers. Google can't stop you from crawling the web, but Facebook would love to.

rtpg 10y ago

Kinda irrelevant to your point, but I heard that Baidu is really quite bad at search.