I think the snarky response here would be “When did Google buy Facebook?” If you’re willing to restrict the scope of the “internet advertising market” to just specifically the things that Google dominates, then duh, Google has total control of “internet advertising”. And yet, there’s another multi-hundred billion dollar company that makes most of its money by advertising on the internet. Scoping markets in this way is nonsense. It a marketer wants to market products on the internet, are they going to put all of their money into Google because it’s the only way to advertise on the internet? Obviously not. And further, therefore there is obviously not a monopoly.
In other words, Google is a monopoly. Their strategy is to monopolize markets and charge artificially high prices for advertising.
It's a weird sort of monopoly though, their users can go elsewhere, but their users are not their customers. Their customers are advertisers, and they are basically forced to use Google.
Google's only product is online advertising, the only kind of advertising that matters in the 21st century.
This is a big deal because they can abuse their advertising clout for evil purposes. (E.g., advertise Chrome but put out a prohibitive pricing scheme for Firefox.)
But it's not a monopoly yet because Facebook and Amazon are competing actors in this space in the USA, and other nations have their own local actors.
In theory, though, if Google went on a really aggressive attack via their Chrome, Android and Analytics properties then they could kill off the competition.
Google can't do that. They'd get sued under anti-trust laws for serious money.
Edit: Seriously. Tweaking your search algorithms to the detriment of some providers and to the benefit of others is one thing (that Google does now, and which they won't be sued for). Deliberately removing a direct competitor with as high a profile (and deep pockets) as Facebook is a different kettle of fish.
Good. Google monopoly is bad for everyone except their shareholders.
I'd love the search market to be split into 3-4 entities with similiar market share - not one getting 80-90% of the cake. Google extracts way too much value out of web traffic, killing the small business - and this phenomenon increases quarter by quarter in its intensity.
The market didn't always work that way. Until Google monopolized it, search engines and ad networks were independent pieces competing on an open market. For example, one of early Google's successes was getting Yahoo to license its search engine.
Maybe I'm foolish for responding to a troll but I dont understand why Google is being considered a monopoly? Its not even a bit-player yet in payments, file sharing or social. It has high (~2/3) but not not monopoly share of search in the US, and higher ~80% share of search ads.
Compared to the monopolistic positions held by Microsoft, Apple (itunes) and Facebook, hardly seems unusual.
Google is a clear monopoly, there's no doubt about it. It has a 70% browser market share, 70% market share in the search ecosystem. Even though their service is good and people are happy, I think they need to be broken down for the sake of keeping an open internet. Even Facebook for that matter. That's my opinion
Despite what Government thinks of Google, I think holding antitrust hearings is just a political theatre. At the end of the day they might slap Google with a penalty which by all accounts will be just a margin of error tax write off. If the government really wants to encourage competition, they need to enable creation of new businesses, plain and simple.
Google isn't a Monopoly as much as they just have the most eyeballs because they built a great company. But Facebook, Pinterest, Snapchat, Reddit, and a few dozen smaller players, are all the answer to Google's monopoly.
I've just spent a few days testing different ad segments, and for the one I was doing, it turns out Reddit was 5x cheaper than the next cheapest source. Cool right?
What we need is more companies that are able to capture eyeballs, and an efficient mechanism to distribute ads among them.
I realize that we are pro-tech around here, but Google really has close to a real monopoly power in many forms of online advertising: search, display, mobile, affiliate, they are pretty much bigger than most of the competition. That doesn't mean they are a monopoly, but they certain can and do set their own rules about how business should be done on the internet.
For example, Google artificially inflates their AdWords ad rates using the quality score algorithm. It's an ingenious little black box that they can turn up the dial periodically as needed without looking like they are raising their rates, they're just "adjusting the algorithm".
Or, Google has many times changed their organic listings that hurt businesses traffic enough to push them to AdWords. For example, selling links as advertising can get you banned from Google, and Google aggressively pursues link networks because they can be a cost effective way of advertising on Google that is cheaper than AdWords.
Google does open source and a lot of amazing things for the tech community, but it's also a business out to protect its core business - online advertising and search. Sure, it has a right to do these things on its own network, but when you own 60, 70, 80% of the internet search volume, it's a fine line between reasonable business decision and anti-competitive behavior.
This is a bad argument. Google tried to make a Facebook competitor... google... and failed spectacularly.
If Google resources can’t overcome the momentum of a big service; then no one can except over a long time.
So while I’m very free hand of market sometimes, I realize the reality that these are currently monopolies in their spaces and have to resources to prevent competition via lawsuits and acquisitions.
Say I make a search engine better than Google. If I market it, I get some share of Google's users. The better my search engine is, the more of user base I “steal”.
What's wrong with that? Is there something Google can (legally) do to stop me?
I wonder if, when a company crosses a threshold we all think violates a Nash equilibrium, we start to oppose the company. With this move, Google is declaring war on a host of web companies that are heretofore thriving and collaborating and making tons of money.
Every dollar of advertising that Facebook makes is a dollar or even more from Google. Every minute that facebookers facebook, google isn't showing them ads and isn't getting click throughs and this amounts to a vastly larger sum of money than any new search engine or aggregator or individual media company which google has already rendered moot to a large extent.
This is real time search which everyone has been asking for with all the data stored on google's super voluminous uber-fast lightning machine with its neurons and axons keeping the world connected and communicating.
Here it is and we don't want it.
The competition is for virtual real estate. Everywhere there is blank space on the screen or blank time in the consumer day or a blank wall in the virtual world, there will be an ad on it, just as today there are ads in nearly every physical space: Public transportation, Bar room mirrors, big screen tvs... Nothing is safe. No one is safe from Google and they have crossed the nash equilibrium where everyone is competing against them, including the websites where they get their content and the websites where people go to pass time.
Google has an extremely blatant monopoly in search. That has been the case for over a decade now.
The competitors to Google, outside of a few markets like Russia and China, are trivial at best.
Google's search competitors are so weak, all they've collectively done is lose market share for 20 years. The social competitors to Facebook - Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, etc. - are no more threatening to FB's monopoly than DuckDuckGo and Bing are to Google's search monopoly.
When companies like Google and Facebook have monopolies, what they do in response is lie: they claim competition is everywhere. Microsoft used that lying tactic as well. They pretend they're not really in the search space specifically, they're an ad company in general, and they're only a small N% of the whole global ad market. So Google likes to lie and pretend they compete with every input box on the Web, and every ad served anywhere on earth; naturally their share of all text input box usage is merely 1%.
Google literally is the poster child of Big Tech monopoly masquerading as a “Technology company” which is a false broad characterization of what it does. Revenues are overwhelmingly from search ads.
If you haven’t been living under a rock, you should be familiar with a decade long fight it has put up to fight off its monopoly status.
Can you elaborate on your reasons why? I like to hear both sides of an argument.
I see Google not as a monopoly but as a majority holder where people have control of what services they use. Are they abusing this position to the detriment of users and market?
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