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Frankly I’m surprised to see that they’re going after Google first. Amazon and/or Facebook are much more vulnerable to an anti-trust lawsuit, and just based on

Frankly I’m surprised to see that they’re going after Google first. Amazon and/or Facebook are much more vulnerable to an anti-trust lawsuit, and just based on some of the public information that we already have they have likely engaged in anticompetitive behavior. I fully expect that antitrust action against FB/Amazon will continue regardless of who wins the election.

gremlinsinc 6y ago
Not sure about Facebook, I mean there's reddit, twitter, etc. Each w/ it's own niche...but Amazon, and Apple, imho are the biggest offenders. Amazon would be first on my list.
- basch 6y ago
  On one hand, theres no way Facebook is a monopoly. On the other hand, the question isnt really whether it is, but if they are being anticompetitive.
  - ToFab123 6y ago
    They hold the power to change an elections. No politicians like that.
    - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
      unless you are changing them in the direction wanted.
      - Mountain_Skies 6y ago
        Short term, yes, but what guarantee does any political group have that the tech companies won't turn on them at some point? Facebook in particular has an ever graying userbase, which means they're naturally going to continue to lean more and more conservative.
        basch 6y ago
        >Facebook in particular has an ever graying userbase I don't buy it. Facebook has always been an adult network. It started as something that kept kids out. They opened up, but they dont need them. Eventually, when people get older they sign up for it. It't not sexy, its utilitarian. Their biggest risk to their business is more addictive products, not their customer age. People can get addicted at any age. TiKTok, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube are still more commoner<>celebrity networks, while Facebook is a WhitePages and now a YellowPages too.
        detaro 6y ago
        From what I see, it's less important with young adults now than it was a few years ago, and it started as something only for young adults that spread upwards through the age groups. It could be reaching a stable point though, true.
        basch 6y ago
        The whole "facebook isnt cool anymore" thing has been going on for a decade now. Linkedin isnt cool. The WhitePages arent cool. Plenty of other properties, like twitch, discord, twitter, carve out their niche. Snapchat was going to be the facebook killer, people got bored with snapchat. But facebook keeps growing. Now TikTok is looking like a threat. But no matter what everybodys favorite place to hangout is, they also have a facebook. And companies keep throwing money into facebook ads. https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
        yeetman21 6y ago
        Politicians only think short term
    - sidlls 6y ago
      They do? What evidence is there to suggest this?
      - Mindwipe 6y ago
        Pretty poor evidence generally, mostly on the say so of snake oil salesmen trying to convince political campaigns to pay them handsomely to do so with extremely uncertain results. I note the conspiracy theory that Cambridge Analytica threw the Brexit referendum via Facebook has essentially completely collapsed over the last month or so. CA certainly wanted their clients to think that such a thing was possible. They were fantasists, for money.
        jen20 6y ago
        > theory that Cambridge Analytica threw the Brexit referendum via Facebook has essentially completely collapsed over the last month or so. You have to have a pretty warped view on proceedings for this to be the case.
        Mindwipe 6y ago
        You really don't. I am certainly not trying to argue that Brexit is a good thing. But the CA narrative has completely fallen apart. https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/social-media/2020/10/how-cambridge-analytica-scandal-unravelled https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/social-media/2020/... https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/2847/documents/27859/default/ https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/2847/documents... The ICO spent three years investigating CA, and the report is very clear that the findings were that they had no effect.
- CogentHedgehog 6y ago
  Facebook controls Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. If you add those together, Facebook controls an overwhelming majority of the social media market share -- way more than the relatively tiny niche held by Reddit and Twitter. Edit: Facebook has 2603 million active users, Instagram has 1083M, Reddit has just 430 million. Twitter is estimated at 326 million. TikTok is the closest thing to a true Facebook competitor with 800M users, and a large share of them are probably concentrated in China -- and the Trump administration already tried to get them banned. (I'm excluding messaging services and YouTube here since they're a different niche). Source is Statista: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...
  - MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
    Reddit has gone significantly more mainstream over the past few years. I remember when a reddit post got 2000 upvotes that was a big deal. Then suddenly it became 4k, 8k, and then I stopped caring it got so large. Reddit is becoming into a weird beast because I've found theres a mentality of people who assume you actively subscribe to the stuff set by default hence why people get upset when you don't tout the same opinion. I've even had people ask me what I was doing in their subreddit, said I came from /r/all, and they basically said "yeah right." Reddit is probably going to dominate the online forum market since it's so much easier to create a subreddit than it is make your own website with forums. My only beef with this is reddit silences things they don't like, and not just things that sound reasonable. My rationale is let these people be. They're dumb enough to discuss this garbage on your platform, so why not collect that data and just monitor it? Better than they go elsewhere and now you have no idea. Also reddit trying to take their anonymous platform and make it so you act as a community member has always been weird to me. That makes sense for public people, not for general users. Especially when bot accounts just harvest upvotes. Twitter is basically what facebook used to be now.
    - CydeWeys 6y ago
      You need to use actual numbers. The total size of the active worldwide userbase on all of Facebook's platforms is at least one order of magnitude larger than reddit. And the revenue they extract from it is larger still. Reddit is merely the world's largest Internet forum. They don't have a moat.
- coldcode 6y ago
  Apple is dominant as a monopoly in what exactly? Their own store, their own hardware, their own OS, their own services? Every business Apple is in has large alternatives. They make money selling you things, not from ads. Everything Google and Facebook do is designed to ensure they make ad revenue or sell your data in some way for money; they need to control every thing in their supposed business (search, android, social media, etc) to ensure they dominate in collecting ad/data revenue which is the only business they make money on. Apple only wants to sell you more devices or device related services which is their business. You can live quite well without any Apple product at all, many people do. Try living without Google. Amazon on the other hand is worse, as they want to control all business segments they get into, even totally unrelated to their business of being a store that sells things. Using your dominance in one type of business to force everyone to also support unrelated businesses with no alternatives is one common definition of monopoly; think dominating railroads to force everyone to use your oil (Standard Oil).
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - hef19898 6y ago
    Amazon and is not t the same time. eCommerce dominant? Sure, but then you have Alibaba, Shopify and eBay in addition to other marketplaces. Cloud? Surely dominant, but you also have Google and Microsoft. Retail? There Amazon is still small if you include stationary retail. Logistics? As much as everybody is complaining, Amazon Logistics is still more of an in-house alternative to UPS, Fedex, DHL,... So again, no real dominance of the parcel delivery market. It kind of gets tricky when you combine all that, but I assume that this would be a fun thing to argue infornt of a court I guess. Google seems to me to be much more straight forward, they clearly dominate search and web ads. The latter with the exception of social, which would be facebooks domain. And with Android, Google is the second largest player in Mobile if you ignore hthe hardware aspect. Not saying either company should be broken up, that's for couts to decide.
    - sidlls 6y ago
      I don't see Alibaba or eBay as competitors to Amazon--the former because it doesn't really operate in the US (almost nobody in the US would know what Alibaba is) and the latter because it just serves a completely different market with different mechanisms and so on. Shopify might be, but it's so tiny in comparison it's hardly unreasonable to suggest it isn't a legitimate competitor. Wal-Mart, on the other hand, might be nearing that status as far as eCommerce is concerned.
johnsillings 6y ago
A great paper on Amazon's anticompetitive practices for anyone who's interested: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.pdf https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.p...
- dwhitney 6y ago
  From the abstract: "This Note argues that the current framework in antitrust—specifically its pegging competition to 'consumer welfare,' defined as short-term price effects—is unequipped to capture the architecture of market power in the modern economy" It's an opinion piece stating that law ought to be changed, not that Amazon is doing anything illegal. I never really quite understand how people think antitrust law applies to Amazon. I don't have expert-level knowledge of Amazon's various markets, but I don't think they have a monopoly in any of them.
asciimov 6y ago
You go after Google first, because they have had such dominance the longest. Anybody else would just argue "What about Google?" As friendly as Facebook has been to the republican party, it doesn't surprise me that they aren't first in line to be prosecuted, if ever.
- andromeduck 6y ago
  Meanwhile at Luxottica... absolutely nothing.
  - Firerouge 6y ago
    It would be nice if there were open source prescription lens designing tools, and plans for cnc lens crafters/3d lens printers. A good start would be defining a set of standard lens sizes so people could at least easily find and print replacement frames.
  - hef19898 6y ago
    Because Anti-Trust wise Luxottica is less of an issue as long as they don't abuse their market power when it comes to sunglasses. they could, if they did stuff like forcing retailer into certain deals and conditions. But unles sthey do things seem to be fne.
    - TuringNYC 6y ago
      OK. How about this: "Meanwhile <any phone/mobile/internet/health-insurance provider> nothing"
      - AlexandrB 6y ago
        These are all problems, I'm just happy that there's an appetite for anti-trust action at all at the federal level. Let's also not forget that phone service providers already had a round of anti-trust back in 1982[1], though it seems like legislators have forgotten why that occurred and let many of the baby Bells re-merge in recent years. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T#Breakup_and_reformation_(1982–2004) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T#Breakup_and_reformation...
zozin 6y ago
I'm not really sure on what basis you conclude that Amazon and/or Facebook are more vulnerable than Google. Google controls +80% of search; it dominates desktop browsers with 70% market share; it effectively owns the most popular mobile operating system and +65% of mobile users use Google's mobile browser; it also owns YouTube and Gmail, which tie neatly into the rest of its products and lead to even more market domination (they read your emails and sell that information to advertisers, etc.). Google has done more to atrophy progress on the Internet than any other big tech company. It has used its monopoly position on search and ads to crush competition. Google has been "evil" for a very long time.
wbl 6y ago
What Amazon is typically accused of, having store brands, is what every retailer does. That's hard to win. Maybe there are other things, but I haven't heard of them.
- mabbo 6y ago
  Perhaps that practice should be examined at every retailer. Should we define a line between marketplace operators and marketplace competitors? Or at least define rules to better ensure fair competition?
  - treis 6y ago
    Branded and store/white-label products have coexisted for a while now. It seems to work for everyone involved. The only players that it doesn't seem to work for are those with a brand but not anything underlying to differentiate themselves. But they're ultimately not driving any economic value so it's not that bad when we lose them.
- hef19898 6y ago
  I'd say some markteplace behaviour is potentially problematic. Amazon knows all sales data on every product on every seller, if Amazon is then selling the same items, Private brand or OEM, it can benefit from a lot of data the individual sellers dont have. Plus the possibilitis Amazon has by owning the marketplace. From personal experience so, once Amazon loses the buy box, the measures to gain it back are more or less what other seller could do as well. No idea how much seller data they use in selecting private brand products so.
  - actuator 6y ago
    Playing the devil's advocate here, Amazon is definitely not the only retailer that can use data. All the retailers have data on what sells in their store, they also have the data on how sales are influenced by shelf placement. Amazon to me is a logistics company, along with their storefront and AWS. Their focus on margins and their competence to use data to drive their logistics chains is what's truly scary. They can optimize a lot of inefficiencies that exist in logistics right now just because of the involvement of different disjoint players.
blazespin 6y ago
They went after Google, because Google has a monopoly. Amazon does well from AWS, but hardly has domineering marketshare in the way Google does. The idea that FB has a monopoly is laughable. Until Trump put the kibosh on them there was a real threat from TikTok. Zuck was getting desperate. Social media is very fickle. Aapl as well only has a monopoly amongst high paying customers. Not sure you can call that a monopoly. Google is a well defined monopoly.
dleslie 6y ago
Amazon has clear and healthy competitors; Walmart, Cosco, Alibaba, Ebay and so on. It would be a struggle to prove that they're a monopoly, let alone that they're using their monopoly illegally. Whereas Google has something like 95% of mobile search, and actively consumes competitors or, allegedly, wields its monopoly to drive traffic away from them.
- closetohome 6y ago
  And what would you go after Facebook for? The same thing as google - advertising. But their market share is smaller than Google's.
  - dleslie 6y ago
    I mentioned Search, not advertising.
    - closetohome 6y ago
      I agree with your assessment. My point is just that search volume or user volume is an indicator of the size of the ad market, which is what any antitrust litigation will mostly be about. They're not concerned with the user experience under these companies, they're concerned about economic impact, which is mostly felt by people doing marketing on their platforms. Facebook is a social media company the way the Yellow Pages was a book publisher - it may be the most visible product they make, but it's not how they actually make money.
adrr 6y ago
Amazon would just point to Walmart as the market leader since Walmart has double the revenue.
ummonk 6y ago
Amazon has substantial competition. Facebook less so, but still more than Google Search.

gremlinsinc 6y ago

Not sure about Facebook, I mean there's reddit, twitter, etc. Each w/ it's own niche...but Amazon, and Apple, imho are the biggest offenders. Amazon would be first on my list.

basch 6y ago
On one hand, theres no way Facebook is a monopoly. On the other hand, the question isnt really whether it is, but if they are being anticompetitive.
- ToFab123 6y ago
  They hold the power to change an elections. No politicians like that.
  - bryanrasmussen 6y ago
    unless you are changing them in the direction wanted.
    - Mountain_Skies 6y ago
      Short term, yes, but what guarantee does any political group have that the tech companies won't turn on them at some point? Facebook in particular has an ever graying userbase, which means they're naturally going to continue to lean more and more conservative.
      - basch 6y ago
        >Facebook in particular has an ever graying userbase I don't buy it. Facebook has always been an adult network. It started as something that kept kids out. They opened up, but they dont need them. Eventually, when people get older they sign up for it. It't not sexy, its utilitarian. Their biggest risk to their business is more addictive products, not their customer age. People can get addicted at any age. TiKTok, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube are still more commoner<>celebrity networks, while Facebook is a WhitePages and now a YellowPages too.
        detaro 6y ago
        From what I see, it's less important with young adults now than it was a few years ago, and it started as something only for young adults that spread upwards through the age groups. It could be reaching a stable point though, true.
        basch 6y ago
        The whole "facebook isnt cool anymore" thing has been going on for a decade now. Linkedin isnt cool. The WhitePages arent cool. Plenty of other properties, like twitch, discord, twitter, carve out their niche. Snapchat was going to be the facebook killer, people got bored with snapchat. But facebook keeps growing. Now TikTok is looking like a threat. But no matter what everybodys favorite place to hangout is, they also have a facebook. And companies keep throwing money into facebook ads. https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly-active-facebook-users-worldwide/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/264810/number-of-monthly...
      - yeetman21 6y ago
        Politicians only think short term
  - sidlls 6y ago
    They do? What evidence is there to suggest this?
    - Mindwipe 6y ago
      Pretty poor evidence generally, mostly on the say so of snake oil salesmen trying to convince political campaigns to pay them handsomely to do so with extremely uncertain results. I note the conspiracy theory that Cambridge Analytica threw the Brexit referendum via Facebook has essentially completely collapsed over the last month or so. CA certainly wanted their clients to think that such a thing was possible. They were fantasists, for money.
      - jen20 6y ago
        > theory that Cambridge Analytica threw the Brexit referendum via Facebook has essentially completely collapsed over the last month or so. You have to have a pretty warped view on proceedings for this to be the case.
        Mindwipe 6y ago
        You really don't. I am certainly not trying to argue that Brexit is a good thing. But the CA narrative has completely fallen apart. https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/social-media/2020/10/how-cambridge-analytica-scandal-unravelled https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/social-media/2020/... https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/2847/documents/27859/default/ https://committees.parliament.uk/publications/2847/documents... The ICO spent three years investigating CA, and the report is very clear that the findings were that they had no effect.
CogentHedgehog 6y ago
Facebook controls Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. If you add those together, Facebook controls an overwhelming majority of the social media market share -- way more than the relatively tiny niche held by Reddit and Twitter. Edit: Facebook has 2603 million active users, Instagram has 1083M, Reddit has just 430 million. Twitter is estimated at 326 million. TikTok is the closest thing to a true Facebook competitor with 800M users, and a large share of them are probably concentrated in China -- and the Trump administration already tried to get them banned. (I'm excluding messaging services and YouTube here since they're a different niche). Source is Statista: https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-networks-ranked-by-number-of-users/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/272014/global-social-net...
- MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
  Reddit has gone significantly more mainstream over the past few years. I remember when a reddit post got 2000 upvotes that was a big deal. Then suddenly it became 4k, 8k, and then I stopped caring it got so large. Reddit is becoming into a weird beast because I've found theres a mentality of people who assume you actively subscribe to the stuff set by default hence why people get upset when you don't tout the same opinion. I've even had people ask me what I was doing in their subreddit, said I came from /r/all, and they basically said "yeah right." Reddit is probably going to dominate the online forum market since it's so much easier to create a subreddit than it is make your own website with forums. My only beef with this is reddit silences things they don't like, and not just things that sound reasonable. My rationale is let these people be. They're dumb enough to discuss this garbage on your platform, so why not collect that data and just monitor it? Better than they go elsewhere and now you have no idea. Also reddit trying to take their anonymous platform and make it so you act as a community member has always been weird to me. That makes sense for public people, not for general users. Especially when bot accounts just harvest upvotes. Twitter is basically what facebook used to be now.
  - CydeWeys 6y ago
    You need to use actual numbers. The total size of the active worldwide userbase on all of Facebook's platforms is at least one order of magnitude larger than reddit. And the revenue they extract from it is larger still. Reddit is merely the world's largest Internet forum. They don't have a moat.
coldcode 6y ago
Apple is dominant as a monopoly in what exactly? Their own store, their own hardware, their own OS, their own services? Every business Apple is in has large alternatives. They make money selling you things, not from ads. Everything Google and Facebook do is designed to ensure they make ad revenue or sell your data in some way for money; they need to control every thing in their supposed business (search, android, social media, etc) to ensure they dominate in collecting ad/data revenue which is the only business they make money on. Apple only wants to sell you more devices or device related services which is their business. You can live quite well without any Apple product at all, many people do. Try living without Google. Amazon on the other hand is worse, as they want to control all business segments they get into, even totally unrelated to their business of being a store that sells things. Using your dominance in one type of business to force everyone to also support unrelated businesses with no alternatives is one common definition of monopoly; think dominating railroads to force everyone to use your oil (Standard Oil).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- hef19898 6y ago
  Amazon and is not t the same time. eCommerce dominant? Sure, but then you have Alibaba, Shopify and eBay in addition to other marketplaces. Cloud? Surely dominant, but you also have Google and Microsoft. Retail? There Amazon is still small if you include stationary retail. Logistics? As much as everybody is complaining, Amazon Logistics is still more of an in-house alternative to UPS, Fedex, DHL,... So again, no real dominance of the parcel delivery market. It kind of gets tricky when you combine all that, but I assume that this would be a fun thing to argue infornt of a court I guess. Google seems to me to be much more straight forward, they clearly dominate search and web ads. The latter with the exception of social, which would be facebooks domain. And with Android, Google is the second largest player in Mobile if you ignore hthe hardware aspect. Not saying either company should be broken up, that's for couts to decide.
  - sidlls 6y ago
    I don't see Alibaba or eBay as competitors to Amazon--the former because it doesn't really operate in the US (almost nobody in the US would know what Alibaba is) and the latter because it just serves a completely different market with different mechanisms and so on. Shopify might be, but it's so tiny in comparison it's hardly unreasonable to suggest it isn't a legitimate competitor. Wal-Mart, on the other hand, might be nearing that status as far as eCommerce is concerned.

johnsillings 6y ago

A great paper on Amazon's anticompetitive practices for anyone who's interested: https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.pdf https://www.yalelawjournal.org/pdf/e.710.Khan.805_zuvfyyeh.p...

dwhitney 6y ago
From the abstract: "This Note argues that the current framework in antitrust—specifically its pegging competition to 'consumer welfare,' defined as short-term price effects—is unequipped to capture the architecture of market power in the modern economy" It's an opinion piece stating that law ought to be changed, not that Amazon is doing anything illegal. I never really quite understand how people think antitrust law applies to Amazon. I don't have expert-level knowledge of Amazon's various markets, but I don't think they have a monopoly in any of them.

asciimov 6y ago

You go after Google first, because they have had such dominance the longest. Anybody else would just argue "What about Google?" As friendly as Facebook has been to the republican party, it doesn't surprise me that they aren't first in line to be prosecuted, if ever.

andromeduck 6y ago
Meanwhile at Luxottica... absolutely nothing.
- Firerouge 6y ago
  It would be nice if there were open source prescription lens designing tools, and plans for cnc lens crafters/3d lens printers. A good start would be defining a set of standard lens sizes so people could at least easily find and print replacement frames.
- hef19898 6y ago
  Because Anti-Trust wise Luxottica is less of an issue as long as they don't abuse their market power when it comes to sunglasses. they could, if they did stuff like forcing retailer into certain deals and conditions. But unles sthey do things seem to be fne.
  - TuringNYC 6y ago
    OK. How about this: "Meanwhile <any phone/mobile/internet/health-insurance provider> nothing"
    - AlexandrB 6y ago
      These are all problems, I'm just happy that there's an appetite for anti-trust action at all at the federal level. Let's also not forget that phone service providers already had a round of anti-trust back in 1982[1], though it seems like legislators have forgotten why that occurred and let many of the baby Bells re-merge in recent years. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T#Breakup_and_reformation_(1982–2004) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT%26T#Breakup_and_reformation...

zozin 6y ago

I'm not really sure on what basis you conclude that Amazon and/or Facebook are more vulnerable than Google. Google controls +80% of search; it dominates desktop browsers with 70% market share; it effectively owns the most popular mobile operating system and +65% of mobile users use Google's mobile browser; it also owns YouTube and Gmail, which tie neatly into the rest of its products and lead to even more market domination (they read your emails and sell that information to advertisers, etc.). Google has done more to atrophy progress on the Internet than any other big tech company. It has used its monopoly position on search and ads to crush competition. Google has been "evil" for a very long time.

wbl 6y ago

What Amazon is typically accused of, having store brands, is what every retailer does. That's hard to win. Maybe there are other things, but I haven't heard of them.

mabbo 6y ago
Perhaps that practice should be examined at every retailer. Should we define a line between marketplace operators and marketplace competitors? Or at least define rules to better ensure fair competition?
- treis 6y ago
  Branded and store/white-label products have coexisted for a while now. It seems to work for everyone involved. The only players that it doesn't seem to work for are those with a brand but not anything underlying to differentiate themselves. But they're ultimately not driving any economic value so it's not that bad when we lose them.
hef19898 6y ago
I'd say some markteplace behaviour is potentially problematic. Amazon knows all sales data on every product on every seller, if Amazon is then selling the same items, Private brand or OEM, it can benefit from a lot of data the individual sellers dont have. Plus the possibilitis Amazon has by owning the marketplace. From personal experience so, once Amazon loses the buy box, the measures to gain it back are more or less what other seller could do as well. No idea how much seller data they use in selecting private brand products so.
- actuator 6y ago
  Playing the devil's advocate here, Amazon is definitely not the only retailer that can use data. All the retailers have data on what sells in their store, they also have the data on how sales are influenced by shelf placement. Amazon to me is a logistics company, along with their storefront and AWS. Their focus on margins and their competence to use data to drive their logistics chains is what's truly scary. They can optimize a lot of inefficiencies that exist in logistics right now just because of the involvement of different disjoint players.

blazespin 6y ago

They went after Google, because Google has a monopoly. Amazon does well from AWS, but hardly has domineering marketshare in the way Google does. The idea that FB has a monopoly is laughable. Until Trump put the kibosh on them there was a real threat from TikTok. Zuck was getting desperate. Social media is very fickle. Aapl as well only has a monopoly amongst high paying customers. Not sure you can call that a monopoly. Google is a well defined monopoly.

dleslie 6y ago

Amazon has clear and healthy competitors; Walmart, Cosco, Alibaba, Ebay and so on. It would be a struggle to prove that they're a monopoly, let alone that they're using their monopoly illegally. Whereas Google has something like 95% of mobile search, and actively consumes competitors or, allegedly, wields its monopoly to drive traffic away from them.

closetohome 6y ago
And what would you go after Facebook for? The same thing as google - advertising. But their market share is smaller than Google's.
- dleslie 6y ago
  I mentioned Search, not advertising.
  - closetohome 6y ago
    I agree with your assessment. My point is just that search volume or user volume is an indicator of the size of the ad market, which is what any antitrust litigation will mostly be about. They're not concerned with the user experience under these companies, they're concerned about economic impact, which is mostly felt by people doing marketing on their platforms. Facebook is a social media company the way the Yellow Pages was a book publisher - it may be the most visible product they make, but it's not how they actually make money.

adrr 6y ago

Amazon would just point to Walmart as the market leader since Walmart has double the revenue.

ummonk 6y ago

Amazon has substantial competition. Facebook less so, but still more than Google Search.