Where's the Antritrust Probe of Comcast, Time Warner Cable, and all of those other shit-eating ISPs? At least Google gives me some fantastic services at little cost to me.
The US Government already controls Comcast and Time Warner Cable through the regulations in the telecom industry, the FCC, and so on. The Feds, for example, can easily interrupt their merger at any time they see fit. These companies are government regulated monopolies (or at the least near-monopolies), much like AT&T and Verizon.
The problem with Google, as far as the US Government is concerned, is that it is not a government regulated monopoly. They fear anything with such vast scope and influence / power, that they don't have a certain level of direct control over.
The purpose of pursuing Google on anti-trust is to bring them under supervision of the US Government. The same reason the Feds were interested in Microsoft. It surprisingly takes very little to cause anti-trust problems for a major company, as little as one powerful senator dedicated to the issue. Google will be brought under a consent decree in the next few years most likely, and by the time the Feds get around to doing that, the market will have likely already made Google's dominance in search a lot less important.
There’s no “they” here, the “US Government” isn’t “concerned” about anything, and the Comcast/TWC merger is at the mercy of an enormously complex political process/system, not some singularly acting Feds who can “see fit” to do one thing or another. Anthropomorphizing an institution as big as the US Federal Government is dangerous, because it easily leads to reasoning about institutions as if they were individual people, but such entities behave in entirely different ways than individuals.
Anyway, with that digression out of the way, if you want to understand the relationship between government regulators and telecommunications companies, I highly recommend Tim Wu’s book The Master Switch. Government regulation of telecommunications industries has often been contingent, contradictory, and somewhat chaotic (in the sense that small nudges lead to dramatic unpredictable changes).
As internet shifts to mobile phones & apps become the dominant way to use the internet, it will automatically diminish the importance of Google Search, & the market will (is already) pricing this in.
I think Peter Thiel alluded to this in an interview recently. From what I recollect, he suggested that by the time Feds act, the monopoly has already been disrupted elsewhere.
Apps are a temporary state of affairs (but isn't everything these days?). In a few generations, your phone will be little more than a terminal that connects to your personal virtual machine hosted on Apple/AWS/Google servers. This VM will run the respective company's OS as well as its native apps. These apps will be unrecognizably more powerful than the ones currently on your phone, and your phone itself will be significantly lighter and more efficient (and, yes, probably wearable).
Google will continue to make money from ads delivered into this virtual space and it will also have more leverage to regulate 3rd party apps, giving it access to the space within the apps as well. Oh, and also all these virtual spaces will have private and public modes.
The biggest problem really is screen area. The only reason Google can't exploit Android to its fullest potential is that phone screens just aren't large enough to dedicate a sufficient screen area to advertisement (it's a funny paradox: the phone as a real-life implement is limited to a form factor that precludes advertising space, which by its nature is always limited to 'sub-prime real-estate'). Perhaps OLED will be the solution to this, though I am more partial to drone-phones that hover beside their owners and use lasers to project the "screen" onto special eye contacts.
It's a funny position to hate regulation on the one hand, and say it's useless on the other... Imma chalk this one up to Thiel saying things more in service of his ideology than relating to reality as she may exist.
Cable and fiber ISPs as they exist now, with the same company owning the wires and providing the service, are inevitably going to be natural monopolies, because of the massive start-up costs of entering the market combined with the trivial (near-zero) costs to the incumbent ISPs to add one more customer.
In that case, new companies have to lay new cables and provision new data centers and hire new people, whereas TWC only has to ship out a cable modem and allow access to pre-existing capacity.
One way around this would be to force TWC and Comcast and so on to divest themselves of the physical infrastructure up to their in-plant demarcation points, spin off new natural monopolies to only own the cables, and force those new companies to lease to all comers at the same low rate, with a managed X% profit spelled out in regulations. That way, an upstart would only have to provision new data centers and hire new people; that's still more than Comcast has to do, but it's a lot less than the current state of affairs.
This is related to Net Neutrality, in that the neutrality rules are more urgently needed as long as ISPs have unshakeable monopolies on a regional basis, but even if competition were more robust it would still make sense to ensure no ISP could become that predatory.
You're lucky. I only have Cable and (crappy) DSL. My cable is good, but the DSL is so awful that if my cable provider decided to triple their rates I would have no choice but to acquiesce and pay up. I think that's the very definition of a natural monopoly.
There is nothing that physically prevents you from building three separate water networks, it's just a stupid idea because it costs three times as much for the same result. And so it is with internet.
I know because I have three high speed ISP options at home: cable, fiber and (decent) DSL.
Where I live there is either cable (which exists because of cable TV) and terrible DSL (which exists because of phone lines). There has never been any attempt to wire the area only to provide internet service. And as far as I know, there is only one set of wires for cable TV. So, it sure appears to be a natural monopoly to me.
Nice job there, trying to derail the discussion. Let's go back to talking about google and how it was blackmailing websites in order to take their unique content and display it directly in search results.
The problem with Google, as far as the US Government is concerned, is that it is not a government regulated monopoly. They fear anything with such vast scope and influence / power, that they don't have a certain level of direct control over.
The purpose of pursuing Google on anti-trust is to bring them under supervision of the US Government. The same reason the Feds were interested in Microsoft. It surprisingly takes very little to cause anti-trust problems for a major company, as little as one powerful senator dedicated to the issue. Google will be brought under a consent decree in the next few years most likely, and by the time the Feds get around to doing that, the market will have likely already made Google's dominance in search a lot less important.