[acover]

Technology often leads to a natural monopoly as it has high fixed costs and low variable costs.

One way I can see changing this dynamic is using open source services. That way anyone is able to clone, improve or change them. Provide consumer choice.

However businesses are aiming for monopolies. Crowd funding and open source might change the dynamic.

It's probably too late for search as the lead is too far. I also doubt most people care to solve a problem before it happens.

[fixermark]

... and benefits from horizontal scaling.

Maps is okay, search is okay. Maps that can take signal from search to figure out what people care about, and search that can utilize geographic signal to guess what a person might want as an answer for "restaurants near me" is huge.

[acover]

You make a good point.

I don't see why that type of sharing can't happen with open source services. Though it would require more customer consent.

[fixermark]

Personal opinion: the fact that type of sharing hasn't happened with open source services speaks volumes about the priorities of the open-source communities and is the single-biggest argument in favor of allowing large corporations leeway to create big cool things with big data. I don't see anyone else stepping up to solve the hard problems like this.

[acover]

Have there been open source projects that had the opportunity to and decided against it?

[fixermark]

OpenStreetMap currently exists. Is there an open-source search engine out there that could try to integrate with them?

[komali2]

Even if everything about search was open source, how would an upstart competitor possibly compete on the hardware front? A single Google-style data center would imo be an insurmountable capital cost.

[fixermark]

They could start on Google Cloud and work their way out from there. ;)

[HillaryBriss]

if there were an anti-trust court case, maybe a court would decide that Google is required to allow, say, a restaurant review site, to use Google Cloud on an equal footing with Google's own restaurant review service.

it reminds me of the decision where ATT was ultimately required to allow user-owned telephones to connect to its wired network. (in earlier times, ATT only let phones leased from and owned by ATT to connect to its network)

[briandear]

You could say the same about shipping companies, airlines or car companies. Yet, competition is everywhere despite high capital costs. Even space exploration has competition. High capital costs aren’t anti-competitive.

[dredmorbius]

True, though I'm coming to conclude that's only explaining a portion of the dynamic. Technlogy also produces points of control -- either of exclusion or coercion.