>> How can it be true that switching is so easy ("just a click away") as to suggest that being the default is meaningless, and yet pay >$8 billion a year to be

>> How can it be true that switching is so easy ("just a click away") as to suggest that being the default is meaningless, and yet pay >$8 billion a year to be that default. When stuff gets paradoxicalish, it can be because the paradigm/model is wrong. In this case, the model is the economic-legal model formulating monopoly theories and antitrust legislation. They were thinking mostly in terms of factories. Thinking of "barriers to entry" in terms of fixed/marginal costs makes a different kind of sense for factories. You can't pay an $nbn "fixed cost" price to "build a fb." That's like the old outsourcing joke/prank: Job: Build me an app that makes $1m. Will pay $10k. It also isn't factory unit economics that determines success for a Google, FB or many other modern mega-businesses. Owning 1% of fb's social media traffic does not yield 1% of fb or adwords' revenue. It's more of a "rewards to scale" than an "economies of scale" thing. Revenue goes up. Unit cost may go down, but that's besides the point for fb or adwords ad revenues. The scale itself matters, not the savings it generates. TLDR: trying to examine google's anatomy using a model based on Bell or Ford circa 1929 will result in confusing questions. Meanwhile, monopolies have a logic of their own. They're valuable, and therefore worth paying to have. That's how deals like this should be viewed, imo. It's strong circumstantial evidence of monopoly. The deal, in itself, shouldn't be the object of objection.