Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Sapient 5463 days ago
How so?

No one is forced to use any of Google's products - Bing and Facebook are only a click away.

A monopoly born from having a superior product is not the same as a monopoly gained through the practises of price fixing or forcing people to install your web-browser with no way to disable it.

1 comments

And Google products generally allow you access to your data quite easily using standard formats where appropriate (for instance, you can export your gmail contacts).

I say "generally" because there are weaknesses. For instance, I don't think you can export your search history or the archive for a google group. You can export your "contacts" but not all of your social connections (at least I haven't found a way). I also haven't found a way to export saved maps or other geo data.

If they expand this policy to all (or essentially all) of your data, they are pretty much immune to anti-trust. And more importantly, it's just better for users. Google has nothing to fear giving your data back to you, anyway -- the only companies that are afraid of that are the less competent ones.