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People say this but there's nothing "natural" about Google's monopoly, to get to where they are today, they had to make a dozen major acquisitions, and if the l
by safety1st 2y ago
People say this but there's nothing "natural" about Google's monopoly, to get to where they are today, they had to make a dozen major acquisitions, and if the last few administrations hadn't been bought and paid for, the FTC could have said no to any of them. In particular they should have looked very very hard at Doubleclick. I mean who are we kidding, they should have said no to Doubleclick.
So we are in a world today where things like Android, Chrome, and the default search experience on an iPhone are all what they are because of Google's need to build moats around the GooDubClick cash cow. More importantly it's really hard to compete with these things unless you have a GooDubClick cash cow of your own, which guess what basically nobody does. Decouple them and that will start to change, there will be many businesses that will take all sorts of novel approaches, and that is what we refer to as "innovation" when we are being pragmatic and un-cynical about what innovation is, it's a dozen or a thousand companies throwing new stuff out there and sooner or later some of it sticks and the world changes.
NOTHING is natural about what Google is today unless you consider the FTC not doing its job for 15-20 years "natural."
- dosinga 2y agoIf the marginal cost of delivering your product is close to zero, markets will tend to monopoly. A search/ads company that has 10% of the market share that Google does (and no one gets even to that), has roughly the same costs but only 10% of the income (and only that if they are as good as Google is in making on money off search). On top of that, having access to the query stream is really important keeping search quality up.
- pretext-1 2y agoAs a European I’m still mad at the regulators for allowing Facebook to buy WhatsApp.