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Comment by warcher | Hacker News Reader

Jesus, yes, how did I have to scroll down this far before I read "ATT was a government monopoly"?

Google doesn't have a monopoly on anything. They have the best search engine, but I can switch in seconds. Likewise the rest of their products all have very well established and really quite functional competitors. That I don't use, cause I like the big G, but I could if they annoyed me too much.

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But new and small businesses can't switch where they go to raise awareness, which always seems to be an underappreciated consequence of Google's monopoly. You either have to buy Google ads or do SEO, and if you SEO, Google can pull the rug out from under you at any moment and you have no recourse.

Consumer protections are for the consumer, not businesses. Plenty of companies have managed to get brand awareness without Google. If you build your business to be entirely dependent on a single point-of-entry, then your business can have the "rug" pulled out by whatever the owner of that point is.

Not to be pedantic, but can you name any?

Mine. I don't advertise through google and our SEO isn't anything special. Est 2010, thanks kindly.

There are lots of competing vendors for display ads. You can also advertise on facebook and Bing. For search ads, I donno. If 1 tv channel was by far the most popular, would ads on it make them an illegal monopoly for businesses that wanted to advertise?

In the context of deciding whether google is a monopoly or not, splitting the advertising market into "search ads" and "display ads" feels pretty artificial.

Google has a monopoly on search ads in the same way that McDonald's has a monopoly on the Big Mac.

Sure you can. I mean, no offense, but there are a lot of people who will sell you a display ad that gets in front of whoever you want. And lord knows there is nothing stopping you from doing cold outreach.

I think what a lot of people want is inbound warm leads for free, without actually reaching out to do sales.

And no, that's not gonna happen. That ship has sailed long ago. You could go viral, that's still a thing. Viral content has never been able to spread farther and faster, although it's pretty damned competitive these days.

The whole issue of Google being a monopoly is silly.

Fact of the matter is that they have a huge influence on the entire economy, and this influence is orders of magnitude greater than any other company.

follow the money. they are a monopoly if it can generate penalties and further the careers of politicians with regulatory powers.

You're describing regulatory capture, and it doesn't require a monopoly at all, merely deeply-entrenched players with effective lobbyists. Many, many industries engage in regulatory capture without having a single monopolist, e.g. pharma, defense, even say the SF housing market.

Yeah, the whole "monopoly" word brings stuff to mind that is more a distraction than useful.

"Orders of magnitude"? That's a stretch. I doubt Google has as much influence as major broadcasters.

>this influence is orders of magnitude greater than any other company.

This is silly, Facebook and Amazon's influence is comparable, if not more. And I'm not even talking about the banks.

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