I think the companies you cited are not very good examples of monopolies or monopolistic behaviors: I've always viewed FaceBook as a fad, just like MySpace that

I think the companies you cited are not very good examples of monopolies or monopolistic behaviors: I've always viewed FaceBook as a fad, just like MySpace that once dominated the social space. Or is there any particular behavior that you find out of ordinary? As for Oracle, while their product has dominated the database (and niche CRM) market, FaceBook, Microsoft use their own or other non-Oracle products. In fact, I have seen more companies using noSQL, Postgresql/MySQL (and its variants) in recent years. Having worked in the wall street tech since late 1990's, I remember how everyone moved from Sybase to Oracle and MS SQL, and now to distributed DBs like Cassandra, etc. Apple faltered because of many bad decisions the company made in the 90's and Apple's revival was Steve Jobs's doing, not Microsoft's funding -- though Gates's decision to support MS Office certainly helped. Not sure about Italy, but the economies of Korea and Japan were orchestrated by (or in very overt collaboration with) their gov't. In case of Korea, they instituted import-substitute-industry model that prevented foreign competitions (by policies of gov't) so their domestic industry had chance to grow and compete and a few chosen companies were given favorable contracts/loans/grants; likewise in Japan their model was better known as "Japan Inc." to describe their alliance between business and gov't interests. It wasn't an "lack of power" that resulted in the structure that we now see in both countries -- they are the intended products of explicit gov't policies.