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by pilgrimfff 1368 days ago
In this case, "the market" is essentially just Google - who incidentally created the market for SEO spam.

I don't necessarily blame Google for the tight integration with Wikipedia. It's much easier to deal with one site than many.

I think it's disingenuous to blame "the market" for what's essentially the decision of a monopoly.
1 comments
wbsss4412 1368 days ago
Did the government grant Google a monopoly?

This is a market outcome. Perfect competition is not the natural state of the market, even though free marketers prefer to hand wave it into existence.

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asdff 1368 days ago
The government is absolutely granting Google a monopoly today. They own the browser, your email, and search. If antitrust had any teeth in this era the company would have been nuked a decade ago if not even sooner.
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wbsss4412 1368 days ago
Antitrust is government intervention into the market. Not enforcing antitrust is not granting a monopoly.

Don’t get me wrong, antitrust is good! Government intervention is necessary. But lasseiz-fares does not mean what you appear to think it means.

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asdff 1368 days ago
When a corporation has an obvious monopoly and the government does not intervene, they are signalling the status quo is allowed to continue
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wbsss4412 1368 days ago
Yes, except that is not a market outcome, that is government intervention into the market.

That is substantively different from a government granted monopoly, wherein it is illegal to create a competing business.

The point is that monopolies are a natural market outcome, and are what created Google. Does Google continue to exist as it is because the government has chosen not to do anything? Yes. Welcome to the free market.

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asdff 1366 days ago
Google was not really created by a natural market outcome when you consider what it takes to be a large multinational corporation operating out of the US. Any time a policy decision is made that can benefit either the larger or more politically connected stakeholder versus the smaller stakeholder, guess who gets the short end of the stick almost every time in practice. It's not the big guy. Google is open about this, they have a political action committee, they have a website page where they open with "At Google, we believe it is important to have a voice in the political process..." (1). To suggest that they don't use these mechanisms to better their own position in this market you allege to be free is naive.

https://www.google.com/publicpolicy/transparency/

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