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Google is very much a monopolist in search. They have more than a 80% usage share of the space (most places I look at say 90% today), and have had that much sha

Google is very much a monopolist in search. They have more than a 80% usage share of the space (most places I look at say 90% today), and have had that much share for more than a decade. (On a separate note they are in a duopoly with Apple in the Phone OS market and a borderline monopoly in the web browser market, giving them a lot of power to throw around in general.) Facebook I go back and forth on. They are undoubtably the biggest player in the social media space, but if you count all social media (reddit, twitter, Pinterest) they are large but definitely not monopoly level. On the other hand, when it comes to real name interaction and local community organization they are completely dominant over the other players. Ultimately I consider the acquisition of instagram to have been over the line enough to consider them deserving of the treatment of a monopoly, but it’s not as obvious a case a google. Their space also isn’t as cut-throat as you would expect due to network effects, and there are other countries where they are in fact locally a completely dominant monopoly. Amazon is definitely not a monopoly by any reasonable definition. All of the fields they are in have multiple other major players as well that they are in fierce competition with.

SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
> Amazon is definitely not a monopoly by any reasonable definition. All of the fields they are in have multiple other major players as well that they are in fierce competition with I can't agree with that. 1) Amazon self-preferences their own products 2) Amazon makes knock-offs of third-party products that succeed 3) For third-party sellers, Amazon is just about the only marketplace that matters. The rest combined don't come close to matching it. John Oliver covered all of this recently. https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-news/john-oliver-tech-monopolies-1367047/ https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-news/john-oliver-tech-mon... https://fossbytes.com/watch-john-oliver-tear-apart-big-tech-in-simple-words/ https://fossbytes.com/watch-john-oliver-tear-apart-big-tech-...
- NineStarPoint 4y ago
  1 and 2 are anti-competitive (and anti-competitive practices on that level are 100% a reason to bring an anti-trust case again them), but that doesn’t make them a monopoly. From a buyers perspective, there are plenty of other places to go buy everything they sell. 3 is an interesting point though. I’m having trouble finding good numbers on exactly how dominant they are as a platform for third party sales but they have at least 3-4 times the GMV of their next largest competitor, Ebay. Best I can find is that, in the US, there was about 900 Billion in online marketplace in 2021, of which Amazon represented about 400 Billion. Being 44% of the market is probably bordering on monopoly level. (And to the first points, about half of their sales were their own products on their own marketplace, so I’d definitely be in support of an anti-trust investigation at the least here)
  - Melatonic 4y ago
    It may just be that we need to update our definition of what a Monopoly is.
    - NineStarPoint 4y ago
      Personally I’d rather monopoly keep its meaning (a commodity or market sector controlled by a single party) and people use other words to describe the other ways a large company can be anti-competitive. But languages do often evolve to take a word specifying thing A that is a subclass of B and start using it to just refer to the entire Subclass B, so wouldn’t be unusual for that to happen.

SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago

> Amazon is definitely not a monopoly by any reasonable definition. All of the fields they are in have multiple other major players as well that they are in fierce competition with I can't agree with that. 1) Amazon self-preferences their own products 2) Amazon makes knock-offs of third-party products that succeed 3) For third-party sellers, Amazon is just about the only marketplace that matters. The rest combined don't come close to matching it. John Oliver covered all of this recently. https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-news/john-oliver-tech-monopolies-1367047/ https://www.rollingstone.com/tv/tv-news/john-oliver-tech-mon... https://fossbytes.com/watch-john-oliver-tear-apart-big-tech-in-simple-words/ https://fossbytes.com/watch-john-oliver-tear-apart-big-tech-...

NineStarPoint 4y ago
1 and 2 are anti-competitive (and anti-competitive practices on that level are 100% a reason to bring an anti-trust case again them), but that doesn’t make them a monopoly. From a buyers perspective, there are plenty of other places to go buy everything they sell. 3 is an interesting point though. I’m having trouble finding good numbers on exactly how dominant they are as a platform for third party sales but they have at least 3-4 times the GMV of their next largest competitor, Ebay. Best I can find is that, in the US, there was about 900 Billion in online marketplace in 2021, of which Amazon represented about 400 Billion. Being 44% of the market is probably bordering on monopoly level. (And to the first points, about half of their sales were their own products on their own marketplace, so I’d definitely be in support of an anti-trust investigation at the least here)
- Melatonic 4y ago
  It may just be that we need to update our definition of what a Monopoly is.
  - NineStarPoint 4y ago
    Personally I’d rather monopoly keep its meaning (a commodity or market sector controlled by a single party) and people use other words to describe the other ways a large company can be anti-competitive. But languages do often evolve to take a word specifying thing A that is a subclass of B and start using it to just refer to the entire Subclass B, so wouldn’t be unusual for that to happen.