| Financial opinion pieces are always a difficult read for me, as they always seem slanted in favor of the company and against any hint of regulations n such. This one seems to have a tone of "can google survive the big bad regulators?" to it that makes me... tired. Consider this excerpt: "In the U.S. and elsewhere, politicians from all party
stripes have sought to attack Google or other tech giants for various perceived sins,including being too big for the
good of industry and consumers. Being Google has meant dealing with perennial regulatory and political nightmares."
"sought to attack"... "perceived sins"... "Being google... has lead to nightmares"Is this language not considered to be pushing the reader's opinion in a certain direction? On a related note, I would like to postulate that monopolies are inherently anti-consumer because they are anti competitive by design. A monopoly as a rule breaks capitalism, which only works because of competition. the fact that harm must be proven somehow is a ridiculous notion and too high a bar. The fact that this is even up for debate is wild on its face and I just don't understand why we're here except for maybe we as a country have a collective case of stockholm syndrome towards the market that the government has shown it is unable to control. Consider the other Google-related link on this very site. Google decided to break adblocking, and because they are a monopoly they can do that. This and other anti-trust laws we've slacked off on enforcing is how we've gotten to the point where there are very few choices for the consumer in many aspects of life here in the states. |
Monopolies are the fact of absence of competition by definition, but not necessarily anti-competitive by design.
But the absence of competition in a market isn't always bad for consumers.
First, a market may not be a consumer market, and more importantly monopolies may be bad for customers because they may improve the product that can be offered. (Netflix acquiring competition had made each streaming services worse, with smaller and less stable libraries and rising prices; it's been a bonanza for content owners, but not consumers.) One factor in why monopolies can be better for consumers is that they tend also to be monopsonies.