

How Durable Are Information Monopolies On The Internet? - tav
http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/13/information-monopolies-internet/

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Empact
I saw Wu's talk at TEDxEast and came away unimpressed. Yes, you can compare
some aspects of Google and Facebook to Standard Oil (e.g. network effects,
economies of scale). But when he makes this connection, he leaves me
wondering: if the problem of monopoly is abuse of market power, what happens
when a monopoly results in little or none? What's a monopoly when the
alternatives are abundant and the switching costs are next to nothing? If
switching costs are nil, then even dominant players can't abuse their power
without risking being cast aside, so you end up with very well-behaved actors,
which is perhaps why Wu can't name any harms.

The point being that the old vocabulary doesn't necessarily have the same
meaning in the modern context. Maybe all this time we should have been
concerned with market accountability rather than market share.

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loganfrederick
I agree with you, and want to expand upon this whole "monopoly" concept on the
web.

I don't want to turn the discussion into one of semantics, but I've seen this
spring up on the internet a lot. From my understanding, Google and Facebook do
_not_ have monopolies in the traditional meaning of the word. The fact that
there are viable substitutes and the companies not having major monopolistic
powers must mean they're not monopolies.

They're generally market leaders in their oligopolies, but don't have the
economic power that Rockefeller and JP Morgan had in their day.

No doubt someone will try to argue about the incredible profits, growth, and
data aggregated by Google, but with a search market share between 60 and 70%,
that's only a majority, not the entire market. As wealthy as they are, even
Google couldn't single-handedly bail out a national economy the way JP Morgan
could in the early 1900s: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1907>

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davidw
Interesting question. Of course it's very difficult to do more than speculate
because the internet as we know it (web, commerce, etc...) has not been around
long enough to really give us a good idea.

