[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.