Forum Moderators: goodroi
From Business Insider [businessinsider.com]:
An organization called Consumer Watchdog landed a copy of a presentation Google is showing around Washington D.C. in its effort to ease lawmaker concerns about the whole Google-Actually-IS-Evil thing.
(Hope it's OK to post the link; both Google's view and Consumer Watchdog's view can be seen there.)
"Google's 'Natural Monopoly': The search giant says competition is 'a click away.' So what if it hasn't materialized?" [money.cnn.com]
The article includes a quote from James Stewart of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL:
""Google's continued gains in market share bear out my contention that Google is that rare breed: the natural monopoly. By natural, I also mean lawful, since the monopoly derives from Google's skill and qualities inherent in the business, not from anticompetitive behavior....I sometimes get the sense that antitrust regulators, in their single-minded zeal to promote competition, ignore the fact that monopolies, in and of themselves, aren't illegal, or even necessarily bad."
Their name is now a verb for web searching.
"Band-Aid" has become a synonym for "self-adhesive bandage."
"Fritos" has become a synonym for "corn chips."
"Coke," in some parts of the U.S., is a synonym not only for "cola drink," but even for "soft drink."
The public's misuse of a trademark doesn't make the owner of that trademark a monopoly, however. And even if it did, being a monopoly wouldn't be illegal per se under U.S. law.
Google isn't a monopoly
Then MV apparently thinks that a lot of important people (e.g. politicians) might not actually believe this, right?
In other words - the folks in Washington seem to increasingly think that Google IS a monopoly. Given the intransparency of their company, be it search algo, Adwords auction, or Adsense pay-per-click and payouts, I wish that the leaders actually act upon this. Better sooner than later.
- Is Google a "monopoly" in search? It certainly has a dominant market share, but it also has two major competitors in traditional Web search, and there's no inherent reason why Yahoo or Microsoft couldn't erode Google's market share if they came up with a better product. (Look at how quickly MySpace was overtaken by Facebook in the social-networking category.)
- Is Google a "monopoly" in online advertising? Not at all. It has a dominant market share in CPC text ads, but even with the Doublclick acquisition, it remains only one of many players in the larger online advertising industry.
- Is Google a "monopoly" in browsers? No.
- Is Google a "monopoly" in mobile-phone operating systems?
- Is Google a "monopoly" in services to libraries?
It's easy to pick one piece of the puzzle and argue that Google is a "monopoly" because it has a larger market share than its competitors within that category, but the same argument could be used against other companies and products. Apple, for example, has a clear monopoly in computers that use the Mac OS, and its pricing reflects that monopoly. The DOJ argued that Microsoft had a monopoly in PC operating systems, but its case against Microsoft wasn't based on the fact that Microsoft had a monopoly: Its case was based on Microsoft's abuse of that monopoly. I don't believe that anyone has made a convincing argument that competition has been hampered and consumers have been hurt as a result of Google's alleged monopoly in Web search.
It's important to remember that antitrust law isn't intended to protect the Yahoos and Microsofts of the world from competition, or to allocate market share according to a Soviet-style formula It's designed to protect the public. The fact that Google came from out of nowhere to take market share from existing big-time players like Microsoft and Yahoo suggests that Google's presence in the marketplace has been a force for good. (Would you prefer a marketplace where Microsoft had a 90% share of the PC OS market, dominated the office-suite market, was the search leader by a wide margin, and had a big footprint in Web advertising?)
Go have a look at the presentation, again. It's all laid out there.
E.g. slide 15 ("Many competitors...")
In search and navigation they mention JUST Twitter, Ask, Wikipedia, and Cuil. They do NOT mention the competitive pressure they receive from Yahoo! and Microsoft, either because they do not see them as competitors, or because mentioning them might raise additional questions over the degree of competition.
So we get Twitter (OK, could be, and shows that Google IS afraid of Twitter), Wikipedia (huh?), Ask (meaningless), and Cuil (meaningless beyond belief). So that leaves just Twitter as someone who -according to Google- could be seen as potential competitor.
On the same slide we see Youtube (yes, Youtube!) listed as competitor in search/navigation and audio/video search. #*$!? Youtube is owned by Google. How can it be a competitor to Google? Please...!
And so we could go through the whole presentation all day long. The watchdog org has pointed out some of the issues to bring awareness to the monopolistic tendencies of Google. And this is very good.
But I'm not going to argue any further with you. You know and I know that I won't buy the Googly view of the world your are trying to sell.
Let's assume, just for the sake of the discussion, that you're correct and Google is a "monopoly" (leaving the issue of coerciveness aside). What's your proposed remedy? Should the federal government allocate so many searches to Google, so many to Yahoo, so many to MSN, etc? Should a certain percentage of AdWords advertisers and AdSense advertisers be peeled off and handed to Google's competitors? Or maybe Yahoo, for example, could be required to make its own search engine more competitive by delivering decent search results, or to make its publsher network more competitive by expanding beyond the U.S.? Or perhaps Microsoft could be given permission to block Google.com with its Internet Explorer browser?
