OSNews

Thom,

I suspect that you are misunderstanding me. The definition of monopoly which I find most useful regards barrier to entry to other players and other things relevant to preservation of competition. (These, more than market share, seemed to be the things that Thomas Penfield Jackson was interested in duing DOJ et.al. vs Microsoft.) If you prefer another definition, that is fine with me. I don't really care that much about hammering out the definition of monopoly. I do care about whether Google's position is anti-competitive or not. I do not see evidence that it is.

It is possible that I am reading too much into google_ninja's post. But I read it as implying that Google has employed anti-competitive practices in the search market, and/or abused its market position. Those would be positions with which I would disagree.

Edited 2008-05-09 13:56 UTC

I can very well call OSNews a butterfly, stating I don't want to hammer out the definition of butterfly, but that still doesn't mean OSNews magically becomes a butterfly.

Look, Google is a monopoly because it owns 53.6% of the online search market share. End of story. I know monopoly has a negative sound to it, and that's probably the reason why people don't want to call Google as such - since everybody loves Google and wants to hug and kiss it.



That's a whole different story. If that's what you mean, then say so, instead of coming up with new definitions or disregarding accepted ones. Personally, I don't really care. At this point, Google is the best search engine there is, and that's why I use it. If someone else comes along, and does search better than Google, I'll be the first to jump ship.

I *really* couldn't care less.

Edited 2008-05-09 14:01 UTC

You are reading too much into my comments

A monopoly is the recognition that a company is dominating a particular market, and forces them to play by different rules so as to not crush innovation and competition in said market.

For example: MS is a monopoly, as such, bundling applications with its OS has a massive effect on competing applications. The act of bundling things like IE/WMP is not a problem, the fact that it is company under monopoly status is the one that is doing it is.

Personally, I buy into this system up to a point. Government regulation of the market has to be done very, very carefully, and with alot of thought and research.

For example, MS SMB protocols. On the one hand, you have a situation where the market is being harmed by the difficulty of other platforms to integrate with windows. On the other hand, there is innovation in SMB dealing with network noise and latency that you will be giving to MSs competition. When you do not allow for rewards for innovation, you end up killing it (as we have seen time and again), and doing things like this will reduce incentive to innovate.

I actually agree with the SMB decision the EU made (which is why I chose it for an example). In this case, I believe that it will do more good then harm to the market, and that Microsoft being in a monopoly position, should have been offering licensing programs for years. Because of their refusal to do so, forcing them to open the protocol is a fair punitive measure, which will give an additional advantage to the competition. This is the proper use of anti-trust law, a correction to the market when it has become unhealthy.

Another example would be Google's complaints about the Search button in the start menu of Vista. MS has been almost a decade behind the rest of the world when it comes to desktop search, and WDS is far from an impressive product. But instead of competing, Google chose to file anti-trust suites instead. I read Atlas Shrugged as a teen when I was in the most liberal/socialist phase of my life, and thought the whole thing was a steaming pile. But this is exactly the looter mentality Ayn Rand was talking about. While I still think she built up alot of straw men to make her point, nowadays I do see that her point was a valid one, and I find it just as frustrating to see vultures manipulating governments to pull down people who are better then they are, rather then putting in the work to beat them fairly.

Sorry for the long post, but I wanted to clarify my views on the subject since they seemed to be very misunderstood. I don't see monopoly as the same thing as being anti-competitive, and I don't see anti-competitive in nearly the same black and white goggles as a lot of people do around here. Sometimes, an anti-competitive practice is a by product of offering a superior product. An example of this is the OSX/iTunes/iTMS/iPod/AAC stack. Sure, its lock-in, sure its anti-competitive, but it offers a fantastic user experience, and apple is not a monopoly.

No they are not. Your professor was either wrong or the dutch have a very different view on monopoly than everyone else.
You are confusing the political term with the economic. There are no artificial barriers favouring Google for entering the search business and there is no lack of substitute goods.
Equaling large market share to a monopoly is a political thing but it no more makes Google a monopoly than it makes you gay just because I say you are.

I think that if we continue to focus on the word "monopoly", and not upon the nuts and bolts of exactly what Google's effect upon the online search market really is, we are going to simply spin our wheels in this thread.

I'd rather let Yahoo run with Google ads than let Microsoft have some about 500 milion public e-mail accounts, two mostly trafficked portals in the Internet, >80% dominance in desktop OS market and >70% dominance in web browser market all together. I suppose that Yahoo and Hotmail combined is more than 50% of all public accounts worldwide. So, this is ALSO a monopoly by your definition, with significantly higher entry barriers (or rather: exit barriers) and with more potential to lock-in.



I don't care if someone has monopoly on something. I do care if I suffer of this. Given past "fair" business practices I'd rather trust Google than MS if I had only these two choices.

You cannot interchange easily market dominance and monopoly. These terms are of different meanings. FYI
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominance_and_monopoly
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominance_(economics)

Edited 2008-05-09 20:35 UTC