[maxore44]

I definitely won't argue that telecoms play fair, but there are high barriers to entry for starting a telecom. If you start a new telecom only to compete for customers with an existing telecom in a certain area, you have to pay a huge expense to build out your network and your upside will be limited by the ensuing price war.

Not arguing that starting a telecom is easier than a search engine, but I think a large part of that difficulty is inherent to the industry.

[pb7]

You’re describing point by point exactly why they’re dangerous monopolies. It’s hard, incumbents have advantage, and even if you do it, incumbents will undercut you because they are already well situated. Consumers have no choice; incumbents frequently at the receiving end of the worst consumer satisfaction. Oh, and taxpayers also paid $400B to lay that infrastructure that apparently newcomers aren’t allowed to have. And yet here we are, going after a search engine that has a dozen alternatives that are just as capable of suiting your needs and new ones able to spring up overnight. It just makes no sense. This is pure manipulation by the government.

[maxore44]

I definitely agree with you that they are dangerous monopolies, I hope I didn't come across as defending them.

I think the overall point though is that both the telecom and search engine market experience the network effect. In a telecom's case, the effect is more literal. For search engines, they increase in value as they can collect data on more and more users (which increases the value of the search engine to the users and the cycle continues). Saying that there are dozens of alternatives to me is like saying there are dozens of alternatives to Facebook. There are, but my Grandma isn't on them so do I really care?

I think that the network effect is really hard to regulate around effectively. Just look at Bell. the resulting companies from the Bell antitrust case are the same companies we are discussing as having monopolies on internet access. I absolutely agree that we have an issue, but I just don't know of a solution.

[pb7]

I disagree that the network effect in Google is anywhere near as substantial as Facebook. You don’t have a social network without your friends on it. You can definitely crawl the internet and make an index out of the cross references and build a search engine out of it. It may be worse at first but that’s because of the data you mine from users, right? So either this whole privacy thing is overblown and it’s really necessary to collect data to make a really great product or no one should be able to in which case Google holds little monopoly power over a newcomer that doesn’t have any of this data.