>You also need to look at the elasticity of supply: in this example, is it easy to enter the search market? You can learn to make a SERP or an algorithm for ind

>You also need to look at the elasticity of supply: in this example, is it easy to enter the search market? You can learn to make a SERP or an algorithm for indexing / ranking results in an algorithms 101 class...but let's not pretend there's not a SIGNIFICANT investment needed in indexing BILLIONS of pages of documents just to be a viable competitor. This is not free by any means, and requires $millions (dozens? hundreds?) of upfront capital just to maybe get a few % points market share. This is not as convincing for your argument as you may think. All it sounds like is "you took a big risk, you succeeded, and now that we see it's a pretty neat thing, we're going to take it away from you, thanks, please take more risks and make more cool things so we can take them from you". The fact that this doesn't happen often is why we can have nice things. As soon as you start seizing things that become successful, the nice things stop.