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by kuschku 3839 days ago
Indeed.

We all profit from having a free market, for that to be existing consumers need to have a choice; the market has to be either free of monopolies, or we have to make sure the monopoly on one market (say, web search) doesn’t quickly turn into a monopoly for other markets (say, mobile OS, web maps, etc), too.
1 comments
icebraining 3839 days ago
"We have to make sure there are no monopolies" (or that monopolies don't "spread") is a dangerous approach, since it leads to the politician's fallacy. It may not even be possible to keep a relatively free market while making sure of that.

The question to ask is: are these EU investigations effective at reducing the number and spread of monopolies? And if they aren't, what should we do?

Because looking at the Microsoft case, the effectiveness seems dubious.

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kuschku 3839 days ago
In the Microsoft case, the effectiveness was still noticeable.

The concept of the Microsoft case: Make sure that Microsoft can not get a monopoly in the web.

How it was done: Install no browser by default, let people pick. People chose what they had heard of, often Firefox or Chrome.

Result: It led to an almost instantaneous drop in IE market share on new windows installs.

And it most definitely helped end IE’s monopoly over the market.

With Google, it will be far more problematic, and might even end up with Google getting broken up into several companies, or even banned from some markets, or even forced to operate like a governmental monopoly, and integrate competing products equally as they integrate their own.

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icebraining 3839 days ago
The data show no significant long-term change after the BrowserChoice screen was introduced (in March 2010): http://gs.statcounter.com/#desktop-browser-eu-monthly-200807...

IE was dropping rapidly before, and it kept dropping more-or-less at the same pace. Firefox actually started dropping right around that time.

People want to believe, but where's the evidence?

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