I agree with you, and want to expand upon this whole "monopoly" concept on the web. I don't want to turn the discussion into one of semantics, but I've seen th

I agree with you, and want to expand upon this whole "monopoly" concept on the web. I don't want to turn the discussion into one of semantics, but I've seen this spring up on the internet a lot. From my understanding, Google and Facebook do not have monopolies in the traditional meaning of the word. The fact that there are viable substitutes and the companies not having major monopolistic powers must mean they're not monopolies. They're generally market leaders in their oligopolies, but don't have the economic power that Rockefeller and JP Morgan had in their day. No doubt someone will try to argue about the incredible profits, growth, and data aggregated by Google, but with a search market share between 60 and 70%, that's only a majority, not the entire market. As wealthy as they are, even Google couldn't single-handedly bail out a national economy the way JP Morgan could in the early 1900s: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1907 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1907