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The Justice Dept has a very strict definition of monopoly [0] -- it requires both 1) the ability to raise prices profitably above that in a competitive market,

The Justice Dept has a very strict definition of monopoly [0] -- it requires both 1) the ability to raise prices profitably above that in a competitive market, and 2) anticompetitive conduct. That means that Google receiving 90% of all searches wouldn't automatically imply market power or anti-competitive conduct, and I can't see how Google or Facebook can raise their prices higher than a "competitive market" if they don't charge anything for their product. How would a competitive market in search and social networking even look? [0] https://www.justice.gov/atr/competition-and-monopoly-single-firm-conduct-under-section-2-sherman-act-chapter-1#cia https://www.justice.gov/atr/competition-and-monopoly-single-...

dominotw 9y ago
How is comcast not a monopoly? That was my only choice when I lived chicago.
- dmoy 9y ago
  Yea actually I am curious here, I don't know the difference. Not sure why you are downvoted, I for one would appreciate someone who knows more to explain.
- leereeves 9y ago
  Did you reply to the wrong comment, or did parent remove a reference to Comcast?
  - dominotw 9y ago
    My comment was me wondering if there is more to monopoly than this > 1) the ability to raise prices profitably above that in a competitive market, and 2) anticompetitive conduct. Since that clearly applied to comcast and nothing has been done about it.
- brixon 9y ago
  That would be a different kind of "monopoly". The government (usually local) granted rights to a single provider in an agreement that they install connections to a minimum user base or geographical area. What would happen otherwise is the providers would only install access in areas that are profitable and not extend further out into the more rural area. What needs to happen is these granted rights should be re-evaluated from time to time.
  - nickik 9y ago
    > providers would only install access in areas that are profitable and not extend further out into the more rural area That is a argument often made by those ISPs but I don't believe it for a second. In Sweden remote rual villages get together, fund a fiber connection to their village (and quite often actually help dig) where some companies is allowed to lay fiber but is required to allow any ISP to compete. The market (and admittedly good general regulation in Sweden) leads to an effect where free people in voluntary association get together with private business). As long as you have single monopoly access these ISP will never update their infrastructure and voluntary offer higher speed and better service.
    - pitaj 9y ago
      Exactly. These franchise agreements are the real culprit behind the issues consumers have with ISPs. I'd much rather have a federal can on franchise agreements than Title II.
- nickik 9y ago
  They are a local monopoly (and in case of comcast more then just local). But you see this is very different. This is essentially a state created monopoly, so the left does never really seem to care about them. They were pretty much born as monopolies. The left is only interested in the 'free market great monopolies and we need to protect the people with regulation narrative'. The right on the other hand does not really care about things that are nominally private, even if it is a 100% imperfect form of a market. They care about symbolic reduction in the state and the state budget itself, plus why go after somebody that has huge interest that the left not be back in power as that could mean absorption in the state.
  - ch4s3 9y ago
    This is a categorically false assertion. Almost everyone hates comcast. And left, right, and center numerous municipalities are trying to break Comcast's local monopolies, but are being stopped by state legislatures. Regulatory capture is a big problem, and the buying of politicians is a problem on both sides politically in the US. *Edit: I'd be curious to know why people disagree with my statement.
    - nickik 9y ago
      Maybe you are misunderstanding me. Maybe I was not clear. With state I'm 'the government' not 'state government' in case this was not clear. I was just trying to say why on federal level does not try to fix these issues on a higher level. My point was that neither sees it as a important enough issue, not to mention complicated because of all the different levels.
      - ch4s3 9y ago
        I'm not sure there's a lot of fixing anything at the federal level lately.
mbillie1 9y ago
Their product is the advertising platform, so the price-raising should be evaluated there. Their consumer "products" eg newsfeed, mail, messenger, search etc are just mechanisms for demographic gathering for the purposes of advertisement sales, or for direct advertisement delivery.
- ucaetano 9y ago
  CPAs have been going down since forever. So yep, no monopoly here, plenty of competition. People who talk about FB or Google "monopoly" don't understand what a monopoly is.
  - jacksmith21006 9y ago
    Fully agree. Heck Bing is one less character and nobody is stopped from using. Chrome takes work to download versus MS browser come preinstalled. If you do not want Android buy an iPhone. Gmail, YouTube, Google photos and pretty much every other Google thing works fine on the iPhone. Do not want a Google home buy an Echo. We really should not be penalizing a company for creating a better product and winning in the marketplace, imo. Google gave away Android source code and Amazon used to create the echo. Google gave away Chrommium and companies use. Google gave away Borg with K8s and TF and all their papers including map reduce and others.
- dlp211 9y ago
  Since Google's entire ad-platform is based on the 2nd bid price auction and they have no control over the prices that advertisers bid, I don't see how they can be raising prices other than making their delivery platforms more valuable to the end consumer.
  - supernovae 9y ago
    One way they raise prices is artificial shortages and altering supply/demand in a way that favors them. The only side that is really a "free market" is content advertising because they don't control all the levers of optimization... but it too will bite your ass and favor them in both marketing and publisher suffering. On google search, they can invoke quality score, sort scoring, auction optimization and create a funnel/flow that advertisers must continually optimize against much to the favor of Google. They also change their TOS to be beneficial to their algorithm all the time now. Take the recent 200% budget change, they can now spend 200% of your budget and they optimize this 200% spend over long(er) terms. Seems to be removing the human touch and favoring the algorithm. They also optimize their CPA to be a black box. I recently switched to CPA because they told me to. What you learn the hard way is that their pricing is modeled in their favor and over averages/terms that benefit them. When you say you want a $1.00 CPA you're not protected against paying exponentially more than that... They even trick you by getting you to update google analytics with "smart actions" that only add bull crap as to what a CPA/conversion is - once again in their favor All of this seems to just scare away the smaller buyers because they can't compete when industry pricing and averaging excludes them from being able to plan/budget and pay for advertising accordingly. The only people with the pockets to play the game are the encumbered organizations that also do other trades with Google - such as large purchases of Google G! Suite, Large deals with Google cloud or their data/analytics services. Login to google adwords, it says "hey switch to CPA" then eventually "hey, use smart campaigns" and sooner or later you can't even control the crap your buying because you can't block/filter/target anymore because the borg is doing it for you and oh btw, we spend your entire budget at 12:01 am sending you 1000 visitors a second even though its not an accelerated campaign and we doubled your budget and we told you to reach more visitors to add more to your budget. Oh, did we not tell you that we weren't running your ads until you increased your budget and now that you increased it we're going to spend 200% more? its crazy... It wouldn't be so bad if these giants weren't trying to kill natural search and natural engagement so fast but they realize the only way they can grow is to monetize the entire funnel and the only people that can afford to do that are the giants.. I wish i could spend more on bing but it doesn't have the traffic mostly for what appears to be obsession for google. In the USA bing is great.. i've heard it sucks elsewhere, but i wish they could compete more.

dominotw 9y ago

How is comcast not a monopoly? That was my only choice when I lived chicago.

dmoy 9y ago
Yea actually I am curious here, I don't know the difference. Not sure why you are downvoted, I for one would appreciate someone who knows more to explain.
leereeves 9y ago
Did you reply to the wrong comment, or did parent remove a reference to Comcast?
- dominotw 9y ago
  My comment was me wondering if there is more to monopoly than this > 1) the ability to raise prices profitably above that in a competitive market, and 2) anticompetitive conduct. Since that clearly applied to comcast and nothing has been done about it.
brixon 9y ago
That would be a different kind of "monopoly". The government (usually local) granted rights to a single provider in an agreement that they install connections to a minimum user base or geographical area. What would happen otherwise is the providers would only install access in areas that are profitable and not extend further out into the more rural area. What needs to happen is these granted rights should be re-evaluated from time to time.
- nickik 9y ago
  > providers would only install access in areas that are profitable and not extend further out into the more rural area That is a argument often made by those ISPs but I don't believe it for a second. In Sweden remote rual villages get together, fund a fiber connection to their village (and quite often actually help dig) where some companies is allowed to lay fiber but is required to allow any ISP to compete. The market (and admittedly good general regulation in Sweden) leads to an effect where free people in voluntary association get together with private business). As long as you have single monopoly access these ISP will never update their infrastructure and voluntary offer higher speed and better service.
  - pitaj 9y ago
    Exactly. These franchise agreements are the real culprit behind the issues consumers have with ISPs. I'd much rather have a federal can on franchise agreements than Title II.
nickik 9y ago
They are a local monopoly (and in case of comcast more then just local). But you see this is very different. This is essentially a state created monopoly, so the left does never really seem to care about them. They were pretty much born as monopolies. The left is only interested in the 'free market great monopolies and we need to protect the people with regulation narrative'. The right on the other hand does not really care about things that are nominally private, even if it is a 100% imperfect form of a market. They care about symbolic reduction in the state and the state budget itself, plus why go after somebody that has huge interest that the left not be back in power as that could mean absorption in the state.
- ch4s3 9y ago
  This is a categorically false assertion. Almost everyone hates comcast. And left, right, and center numerous municipalities are trying to break Comcast's local monopolies, but are being stopped by state legislatures. Regulatory capture is a big problem, and the buying of politicians is a problem on both sides politically in the US. *Edit: I'd be curious to know why people disagree with my statement.
  - nickik 9y ago
    Maybe you are misunderstanding me. Maybe I was not clear. With state I'm 'the government' not 'state government' in case this was not clear. I was just trying to say why on federal level does not try to fix these issues on a higher level. My point was that neither sees it as a important enough issue, not to mention complicated because of all the different levels.
    - ch4s3 9y ago
      I'm not sure there's a lot of fixing anything at the federal level lately.

mbillie1 9y ago

Their product is the advertising platform, so the price-raising should be evaluated there. Their consumer "products" eg newsfeed, mail, messenger, search etc are just mechanisms for demographic gathering for the purposes of advertisement sales, or for direct advertisement delivery.

ucaetano 9y ago
CPAs have been going down since forever. So yep, no monopoly here, plenty of competition. People who talk about FB or Google "monopoly" don't understand what a monopoly is.
- jacksmith21006 9y ago
  Fully agree. Heck Bing is one less character and nobody is stopped from using. Chrome takes work to download versus MS browser come preinstalled. If you do not want Android buy an iPhone. Gmail, YouTube, Google photos and pretty much every other Google thing works fine on the iPhone. Do not want a Google home buy an Echo. We really should not be penalizing a company for creating a better product and winning in the marketplace, imo. Google gave away Android source code and Amazon used to create the echo. Google gave away Chrommium and companies use. Google gave away Borg with K8s and TF and all their papers including map reduce and others.
dlp211 9y ago
Since Google's entire ad-platform is based on the 2nd bid price auction and they have no control over the prices that advertisers bid, I don't see how they can be raising prices other than making their delivery platforms more valuable to the end consumer.
- supernovae 9y ago
  One way they raise prices is artificial shortages and altering supply/demand in a way that favors them. The only side that is really a "free market" is content advertising because they don't control all the levers of optimization... but it too will bite your ass and favor them in both marketing and publisher suffering. On google search, they can invoke quality score, sort scoring, auction optimization and create a funnel/flow that advertisers must continually optimize against much to the favor of Google. They also change their TOS to be beneficial to their algorithm all the time now. Take the recent 200% budget change, they can now spend 200% of your budget and they optimize this 200% spend over long(er) terms. Seems to be removing the human touch and favoring the algorithm. They also optimize their CPA to be a black box. I recently switched to CPA because they told me to. What you learn the hard way is that their pricing is modeled in their favor and over averages/terms that benefit them. When you say you want a $1.00 CPA you're not protected against paying exponentially more than that... They even trick you by getting you to update google analytics with "smart actions" that only add bull crap as to what a CPA/conversion is - once again in their favor All of this seems to just scare away the smaller buyers because they can't compete when industry pricing and averaging excludes them from being able to plan/budget and pay for advertising accordingly. The only people with the pockets to play the game are the encumbered organizations that also do other trades with Google - such as large purchases of Google G! Suite, Large deals with Google cloud or their data/analytics services. Login to google adwords, it says "hey switch to CPA" then eventually "hey, use smart campaigns" and sooner or later you can't even control the crap your buying because you can't block/filter/target anymore because the borg is doing it for you and oh btw, we spend your entire budget at 12:01 am sending you 1000 visitors a second even though its not an accelerated campaign and we doubled your budget and we told you to reach more visitors to add more to your budget. Oh, did we not tell you that we weren't running your ads until you increased your budget and now that you increased it we're going to spend 200% more? its crazy... It wouldn't be so bad if these giants weren't trying to kill natural search and natural engagement so fast but they realize the only way they can grow is to monetize the entire funnel and the only people that can afford to do that are the giants.. I wish i could spend more on bing but it doesn't have the traffic mostly for what appears to be obsession for google. In the USA bing is great.. i've heard it sucks elsewhere, but i wish they could compete more.