[graeme]

You seem to be using monopoly to mean “big” or some other definition.

None of the companies you list are monopolies. Google is the closest in terms of market share but even that is a weak case. It is impossibly easy to get to Bing or DuckDuckGo, and there is the obvious, massive lateral threat that is chatgpt and other llm’s.

Amazon is about 40% of the e-commerce market. Much much less of retail.

[MattGaiser]

Indeed. I find the Amazon as a monopoly argument very curious when they are smaller than Walmart as a retailer. Walmart is a similar percentage of the regular retail market in the USA.

[danaris]

OK; I think we should break up WalMart, too.

The wave of consolidations that has been basically non-stop since the Reagan administration has left us with way too few competitors in way too many markets. We in tech are just particularly blind to it because of the platform duopoly that has seemed "natural" since the first major platform war between Microsoft and Apple in the '90s—there's this feeling that of course there will be a fight between a small number of competitors, and of course we'll end up with one company holding the lion's share of everything, partly due to network effects.

In a truly healthy, competitive economy, we wouldn't even be able to list the number of prominent online or brick & mortar retail companies in the "top tier" on both our hands.