DEFINITION: Last I checked, a monopoly occurs when consumers have limited access to a variety of products, or limitation of their access to a specific product. A large “marketshare” doesn’t mean a monopoly, though a monopoly usually indicates a large “marketshare.” Having the only product in a market doesn’t make a monopoly (i.e. adsense)

- Google is NOT a monopoly. Google doesn’t “control” anything. Consumers do NOT have limited access to other search engines. Consumers are not in any way limited only to access of Google.
- Microsoft IS a monopoly. Microsoft does “control” everything when every consumer level computer I try to buy comes with a certain Microsoft operating system pre-installed with IE.
- Firefox can do whatever they want, because Mozilla is NOT a monopoly.
- IE can’t do whatever they want, because Microsoft IS a monopoly!!!

And last, Microsoft is an operating system with a built in web browser (IE) while GOOGLE is simply a website that you need a browser for.

Its comparing apples to oranges.

My point was that Google basically hasn’t produced much since developing a pretty good search engine. Google gets rich off selling advertising in other peoples content, thanks to crypto-socialist internet dogma that has discredited the concept of intellectual property.

The web 2.0 business model relies way too much on free stuff with advertising and increasingly the only one benefiting or making any money is Google.

My organization being a Google AdWord based advertiser in Indian market for quite sometime now (3 years on a row now), what we have seen is this so called democracy of advertising cost in Google platform finally hurts. There is hardly any optimization strategy works well, on top of that they make it more moronic by providing automated optimisation button which lazy SEM analysts just press without even understanding the trap.

You don’t have much flexibility anyway, it is not a consumers’ market, it is a supplier market, where you don’t have a choice. Google is like T model Ford, and we all need a car.

Over last year our cost of acquisition has gone up almost double and Google is no more a platform for small players like us. It is clearly yet another platform the big guys can use.

Google에게도 검색시장 독점이나 개인정보 수집 등의 문제로 정당성의 위기가 올 수 있다. 언제나 그렇지만, ‘선량한 독점 기업’이라는 건 있을 수 없는 법이기도 하고………

no one cried when they savaged the analytics industry….

not enough people screamed when they used min bids to supposedly get rid of arbitragers at the expense of all advertisers….

not enough complained about the use of Quality Scores for PPC which was another way of them raising the min bids…

I bet 120% that if thugs like Robert Mugabe (Zambabwe) , Fidel Castro (Cuba) , Hugo Chávez (Venezuela) , dear leader Kim Jong-il (North Korea) are reading comments on this thread, they would be delighted. It confirmed to them that capitalism is evil after all, since they see communists & socialists calling for legislators (indirectly) to muzzle the productive of the society such as Google via legislation using the anti-trust law. Such interference from the state legislators is quite damaging & destructive to these private companies.

Here are some of those comments:

Matt said…
They need to decide if they are a search engine (including a relevance-ad distributor), a development platform provider, or an application service provider.

Scott Cleland said…
Google is increasingly behaving the way they say they don’t like others to behave.

Peter Verkooijen said…
What angers me about Google is that they’re trying to have it both ways. On the one hand they’re a normal company out to make money, which is great. I’m all for capitalism. But on the other hand they play this holier-than-thou, do-no-evil crypto-socialist “open internet” game.

Here is a simple message to socialists/communists on this list. Google doesn’t owe you anything at all, not a single cent. Google only serves the interests of its rightful owners, ie, its shareholders. Google is entitle to run its business the way it sees fit. It doesn’t have to play darling to whingers with socialists/communists attitude because the market forces will correct how Google run its business and this is based on pure voluntary action between consumers and Google. There is no such thing as anti-competitive in the free market. There is only a better and worse competitor and until socialists/communists on this list realized this fact, then stop moaning about property of others that is not yours. Remember it is free to use , free not to use it. I bet that commenters with socialists/communists attitude here would be the first one to jump up and down if Google announces that they will start charging for fees for anyone using their search engine. Socialists & communists don’t want to produce, they just want the state to do the nanny on their behalf. Yep that’s right. Socialists/communists like nanny state, because they can’t take responsibility for themselves and that is the reason they require the state to nanny them against evil businesses like Google, after all, Google is giving users a free service which is voluntary to join or not to join.

Don’t try to destroy the American dream that your forefathers had fought for in establishing a great nation. They had a grand vision to protect individual property rights and not to destroy it. Now you have lobbyists, whingers (unproductive people of the society) calling for the destruction of the private property of the productive people & wealth creators of the society such as Google, Microsoft and so forth. If you keep following this path of destruction of private properties (wealth creators economic vehicle), then in a 100 years or so, the US might follow what other former global empires went thru, ie, decline into a ranking of 3rd, 4th, 5th or even lower in terms of economic powerhouse. Your grandchildren will look up to China, with its many Microsoft-type & Google-type entrepreneurs of the day and wish, how can we be innovative like those wealth creators in China? Your grand children wouldn’t know that the US decline was solely the result of disrespecting private property rights over a hundred year period earlier, ie, the continual destruction of the private properties of the entrepreneurs & wealth creators.

Here is a message to Socialists/communists here. Start producing yourself with a product that can compete with Google, and stop moaning about how other property owners are running the business legitimately.

Thanks for the economics lesson – just went back to my text books (and Google) and could not find anything about Candyland?. Is this another land that conspiracy theorists have dreamed up? Just checked my honours degree in economics to make sure it was not issued by the University of Candyland – phew, it wasn’t. Lucky for that, I was starting to believe that the US Government planned September 11, and that George Bush started the Skull and Bones Club at Yale while he was there! Fool.

What angers me about Google is that they’re trying to have it both ways. On the one hand they’re a normal company out to make money, which is great. I’m all for capitalism. But on the other hand they play this holier-than-thou, do-no-evil crypto-socialist “open internet” game.

Google has helped discrediting intellectual property rights. Asking to get paid for content is now considered evil. Everything has to be free with an ad model. Somehow increasingly the only one actually making any money is Google, by selling advertising in other people’s content. Most startups now have no business model other than getting acquired by Google.

It will be hard to repair the damage done without restoring intellectual property rights, including the rights to your own personal/social data. Or perhaps we should push for Google to open source their search technology or open up their ad network to third parties.

The MS monopoly is far more persistent. Better operating systems can’t beat MS. Whereas, if someone created a disruptively better search than Googlel, it won’t be a huge hurdle for anyone to start using it, and like Infoseek, Altavista, Netscape, Lycos, Excite, and other dominant web properties, they could evaporate overnight.

MS has the luxury of resting on an enormous worldwide path dependency for their operating system that compels virtually anyone to have a copy of it for some purpose, at some time in their lives. I use OSX and Linux for years, and I still am forced to boot into MS once in a while.

As for Google branching out, there is nothing evil about it. Is “Gears” evil? Google has been very good for openness on the web.

Google = Conflict. They need to decide if they are a search engine (including a relevance-ad distributor), a development platform provider, or an application service provider. It’s is pitiful how, each day, more and more services rely on tools from Google to communicate, monetize, and lately even host and data-compute their applications… this same company (Google) is “hard” at work engineering a lesser quality product that will come and vanquish the small application relying on them today… it’s a bullshit scheme this wickedly evil company are running over there and more people have got to start calling them out on it.

So as far as “end” of innocence goes? I’m saying that happened as soon as Google stepped out of the realm of search and began it’s rampage of covert web-application genocide. (Very much “pre” circa-2008).