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It would be great to see more balanced discourse on monopolies, especially in a software-dominated world. Most analyses and articles fixate on the costs of mono

• rgbrenner 9y ago
  so if you do something good, you should be permitted some amount of illegal behavior? If you're a priest, perhaps you would be permitted 1 murder, in exchange for your good behavior over the years? Is that what you're saying?
  • karajima 9y ago
    Well, if that 'murder' was an execution of a convicted criminal. Why not?
    • kingbirdy 9y ago
      I know MapQuest is pretty bad but I don't think Google Maps out competing it is equivalent to executing a convict.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • ionised 9y ago
      Because the death penalty is dumb?
  • nickik 9y ago
    Being a monopolist is not illigal. Also in the US Anti-Trust cases need to probe harm to consumer. This is not the progressive area where you can just use Anti-Trust law against any company you don't like.
    • rgbrenner 9y ago
      3rd sentence from the parent I was replying to: "Let's assume the worst of Google and conclude they abused their search monopoly."
  • panabee 9y ago
    excellent straw man. :) killing a person and killing a competitor are very different. if they were identical, jeff bezos would be serving 1000 life terms. :) the desire to dissolve monopolies is based on frameworks defined decades ago. the question is whether these frameworks are as applicable today -- and in particular to software companies like google that do not charge consumers (with money). perhaps these old frameworks remain applicable, but it's difficult to consider their conclusions valid if they are biased to only see harm. that would be like saying cars and airplanes are terrible because they ruined the railroad industry. to reiterate, maybe society is worse off with monopolies. but one cannot credibly make this assertion without considering both the costs and benefits.
• frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
  >But Google's search monopoly and concomitant cash flows also gave society free worldwide communication, self-driving cars, cheaper smartphones, free digital maps, and countless other benefits. To be clear you can't be sure those things wouldn't be around if google hadn't had a search monopoly. Maybe we would have even better digital maps for example had there been way more firms competing. Monopolies can't just be measured by the businesses that they outcompete but also in all the never-realized businesses who their market domination discouraged.
  • ng12 9y ago
    How does Google's search monopoly lead them to self-driving cars? This is why I question the Google vs Bell comparison. It seems to me Google wins because they are really, really good at producing technology, not because they have a systematic first-comer advantage.
    • Retric 9y ago
      Monopolies tend to be lest cost conscious. So, Google may be over investing in their self driving team which could cause a less efficient solution to win. Picture the MBA where one team Q spends 100m/year per player to get the best players and more importantly keep them from other teams, but Q has a poor coaching staff. The fact Q keeps wining reduces the drive to replace that poor coaching staff, and other teams may fail to compete so they may give up on the playoffs instead focusing on cheaper players. Not fast forward 20 years and the sport is overall in a worse position with Q lowering standards because nobody else is really competing. For a more relevant example consider the IE 6 stagnation before Firefox.
      • ng12 9y ago
        That's just economics at work though. The guy with more money to blow will always have an advantage.
        • Retric 9y ago
          Not so much. The invisible hand of economics just means the less efficient or less desired producers are pushed out of the market. It's just that the guy with more money can often invest it to become more efficient.
• dkarapetyan 9y ago
  You should use quotes around free.
  • JustSomeNobody 9y ago
    Exactly. My data is a currency and I have to spend some of it to get those services.
• stingrae 9y ago
  Pre-breakup, Bell Labs produced a very large percentage of the scientific/engineering breakthroughs that power our modern world. The breakup arguably changed Bell Labs, hurting its ability to hire talent as well as its access to resources.
  • ticviking 9y ago
    It also freed their patent library and talent to develop a whole host of new products and technologies which lead pretty directly to Google and the WWW as we have it today.
  • rayiner 9y ago
    The Xerox monopoly also produced a large percentage of the breakthroughs that power modern computer technology. It went into rapid decline after an antitrust settlement forced it to hand its patents over to Japanese competitors.
• iandanforth 9y ago
  Rockefeller was an ardent proponent of Monopoly because to him it was obviously the most efficient system. He controlled the price paid for crude, the manufacture of oil, and the prices paid for transportation. Under this control he substantially lowered prices for the consumer. Of course this also meant that all profits went directly to him making him one of the richest people to have ever lived. Interestingly he also railed against using monopoly to price gouge. He could enforce minimum prices to preserve market stability but rarely charged exorbitant rates. That restraint however is not intrinsic to monopolies and, in fact, the contemporary populace had a hard time believing his motives weren't purely short-term and profit seeking. Today Google might be in a similar situation where the thing that will take down their huge position of control is not bad behavior toward their end users but a well justified fear that that power can be abused (and would be abused by most people)
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • Unkechaug 9y ago
    So are you saying that this kind of situation is considered OK by most people's standards, so long as the party in control acts as a "benevolent dictator"?
    • jlamberts 9y ago
      I think in theory most people would agree that a benevolent dictator is a good thing both economically (monopolies) and politically (actual dictators). The problem is that human nature gets in the way in both cases, so you can't really trust a company or a leader to stay benevolent (or that their successor will be even if they are).
    • rpiguy 9y ago
      Replace the words "benevolent dictator" with "winner." People go to Google by choice, they win based on consumer preference. Unlike say, Windows, there is nothing locking you into Google you don't have to use Chrome or GMAIl, or their search. Yes a lot of people are okay with one company controlling 80% percent of a market if - they get there by relatively fair practices, there are clear and viable alternatives, and the consumer isn't forced to use them. Now if the behavior of the "winner" starts to have clear, negative effects on consumers and consumers are no longer happy, the story changes considerably. Maybe I could see an argument against the greater Google ecosystem (Android, Google Play, which does lock you into Google), or the distributor of content also being a content creator, etc.
• bannedtruth 9y ago
  "But Google's search monopoly and concomitant cash flows also gave society free worldwide communication, self-driving cars, cheaper smartphones, free digital maps, and countless other benefits." LOL
• nabla9 9y ago
  Balanced discourse should start with everybody explaining what they mean with "monopoly" and not assuming that they know or others know how the term is used. Monopoly power. It's clear that Google does not have pure monopoly. Google has so called monopoly power. Monopoly power can create barriers to entry with different mechanisms. Some examples * reduced number of competitors * limit pricing * set-up costs * loyalty schemes * vertical integration * horizontal integration * economies of scale * network externality Company or companies having monopoly power does not automatically mean that they have to be divided or cut down. It means that they have to work under more restrictive rules that disable some advantages of having monopoly power. --- Personal analysis: I think Google, FB, MS, Apple, Amazon are doing their best using their monopoly powers get leverage and creating internet economy where distributive innovations sell to the big players and they are able to maintain the monopoly. How to deal with that is complex issue. Limiting monopoly powers should be done intelligently.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• thr0waway1239 9y ago
  >> Let's assume the worst of Google and conclude they abused their search monopoly. Innovation in search was stifled. Competitors were damaged and achieved only a fraction of their potential. For instance, Yelp might be worth $15B instead of $3B in a world without "evil" Google. Abuse manifests itself in many ways, only one of which is the stifling of innovation. Let us consider the lookalike audience feature in Facebook and Google. You, the engineer, are tasked with improving the efficiency of the system. You are told that a 1% improvement in the effectiveness of this targeting produces like a gazillion dollars in the company's bank account. You start by running some numbers to understand the effectiveness of the current system. You need some metrics to do this, obviously. One metric is the click through rate of an ad when it targets a certain lookalike segment, which is probably easy to measure. But then you see if it lead to a purchase - but how can you do this? In the world of ad-ROI measurement, this is like the last mile - the so called click attribution problem. You come up with the following suggestions to your bosses: 1. Capture more of the data going through the inter-pipes. Create Google Analytics so you know who goes to which website. Have people logged in to Facebook permanently, often without their knowledge. Make apps which ask for all kinds of permissions which they don't need. Create devices which are capable of tracking anything you want, and you control the switch remotely. 2. Buy every company in sight which might have collected some reasonable amount of data 3. Start making data triangulations. Collect and purchase datasets which allow more of this. 4. To get people to spend more with you, expand the size of the smallest sized lookalike segments (larger surface area for ad targeting). This will at some point take you back to steps 1, 2 and 3. Imagine all this going on at Google and Facebook scale. But wouldn't this all happen even when there are no monopolies? Perhaps, but there would be a lot of potential for data brokerages. And those data brokerages, not unlike markets of goods and services, will start assigning accurate prices for personal information. The monopolies are preventing these data brokerages from being created. They are cutting out the middlemen, so to speak. And more often than not, they are doing it with the sort of impunity that was inconceivable even a few years ago. Right now, no one really knows if their personal information is worth anything. But if it wasn't worth anything, then Facebook to a larger extent and Google to a smaller extent, wouldn't be nearly as profitable. There are many startups being created today which don't want to call themselves that, but are glorified data brokerages with the explicit goal of being acquired by a tech giant to get a big payout in return for the consolidation of often private information. For example, around 2012 I heard of the idea of 'privacy lockers' where people will put their personal information and all companies will have access to it, but for a price. Imagine that! If that had actually come into existence, Facebook would have been acquired by the privacy locker company of course. Which in some ways only leads us back to the original problem. So the next question is whether this consolidation in and of itself is a bad thing? I don't know, is a nuclear weapon dangerous when it is controlled by a madman? It is worse in some ways. We can't be certain about either the potency of the weapon (private data) or the sanity of the people in charge (corporate motivations). There will be a reset button at some point. Splitting up the companies into smaller entities seems like a hasty conclusion today. When (not if) these tech giants cross some unacceptable privacy boundaries, the resulting backlash is going to result in a lot of wistful "wish we could go back in time when splitting was still an option" thoughts.
• ionised 9y ago
  > also gave society free worldwide communication How is that now?