[sctb]

You've been posting mainly inflammatory comments about Google and Facebook. Could you please try switching it up?

> Please don't use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle. This destroys intellectual curiosity, so we ban accounts that do it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[mudil]

These are not inflammatory comments. These are facts about two monopolies, that are dangerous for society and for the internet in general. Plus there is this important thing called privacy of the individual.

[JumpCrisscross]

> These are facts about two monopolies

If you poke through my comments, you'll find we share antipathy for Facebook and, to a less degree, Google. That antipathy, however, is an opinion. Not a fact. Neither Facebook nor Google are monopolies by any common definition.

Their business models disagree with our values. But a lot of Americans do as well. Your comments forego the debate necessary to establish agreement, and in that respect I think they are inflammatory. (As well as unproductive towards our common cause of convincing people these companies should be regarded with more caution.)

[Doctor_Fegg]

Depending on the data source, Google has 80%+ share of the search engine market in many countries (such as here in the UK). That's a level often considered monopolistic.

[bduerst]

No, that's considered having a large market share. Monopolies do not have competitors and have markets that are difficult for other companies to enter. Google has competition, both search (Bing, Baidu, DDG, etc.) and ads (MSN, Facebook, Twitter, etc.).

Put another way, monopoly companies have a large market share, but not all companies with a large market share are monopolies.

[patrickg_zill]

https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a...

The FTC explains their view of what is a monopoly.

[ColinWielga]

I recently learned a new word: monopsony. That is, a market where single buyer has enough market power to dictate the terms of sale.

If google is not a monopsony they are certainly very close. This is reflected in the margins of online publishers vs those of google. If you want to publish content online, you have to do it on googles terms.

This degree of market power over the flow of information frankly makes me pretty uncomfortable.

[mudil]

Serious question. How is it that Google makes billions of dollars on ads and newspapers that depend on ads are suffering?

[Jyaif]

Because depending on ads to pay journalists is a crappy business. Ads are worth it if the content with the ads is super cheap to generate (e.g. search result pages, or user generated content)

[Andrex]

What's the difference between Google and newspapers? A massive focus on technology.