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by lallysingh 2972 days ago
Monopoly on what? google.com? Android?

Google's power comes from its (a) technical prowess and (b) popularity of some of its products. Many of their products get a large advantage just from being on their own internal platform.

But I can't think of a product of theirs that doesn't have a strong competitor. Search is the strongest they have, and the underlying problem's getting a bit simpler (I believe it's substantially cheaper now to pay for the infrastructure for a good-enough web crawler than it used to be), and competitors give pretty good results as well. I'm a bit surprised Apple hasn't tried going after this beachhead yet.

Android can be avoided by using an iPhone.

I can get an email account for free nearly anywhere. Every ISP I've had in the last 20 yrs has given me one (that I don't use).

Google's got a lot of influence, and I think AMP is quite the overreach, but they don't fit in the monopoly bucket. If you want, it's pretty easy and reasonable to avoid using them. At least as consumer -- I can't speak as an advertiser. But I don't have a lot of sympathy for advertisers.
1 comments
dmitriid 2972 days ago
Google have monopoly on search (up to 90% in some markets). So anything they do with AMP is anti-competitive, for example.

Google have monopoly on business email, close 85% if you trust reports from Datanyze [1]. And now they are pushing AMP for email with exactly 0 external input [2][3]

[1] https://www.datanyze.com/market-share/email-hosting/gmail-fo...

[2] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13597

[3] https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/13623

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lallysingh 2972 days ago
Dominant market share != Monopoly.

> the exclusive possession or control of the supply or trade in a commodity or service. "his likely motive was to protect his regional monopoly on furs"

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