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Comment by sfifs | Hacker News Reader

This appears to be a common misconception that monopolies are bad from a public policy standpoint.

For public policy, the existence of a monopoly is neither here nor there. Monopolies are problem ONLY IF their operations causes negative economic effects to consumers - typically by raising prices. Indeed in many cases (eg. Transport, Infrastructure) a monopoly is actively granted in return for guaranteed availability and pricing.

In Google's case, it would be very very difficult for any lawyer to show how their actions actively hurt consumers - note consumers, not businesses.

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"Absolute power corrupts absolutely."

Google clearly has a monopoly. Eventually they will abuse it, even if they're not doing so already (which is open to debate). The stronger their control, the more damage they will do and the harder it will be to release ourselves from it.

Monopolies are bad, although sometimes they are the least bad choice. I see plenty of good alternatives to Google's monopoly.

> Monopolies are problem ONLY IF their operations causes negative economic effects to consumers - typically by raising prices.

The more I think about it, the more it seems as thought we need to put a price tag on the data companies collect about users. Google may be raising prices all the time by tracking more and more data about you, but this is completely opaque because even though information is "the new oil" no one puts a real price tag on it.

Is this true? Wasn't Microsoft brought down for harming incipient businesses by bundling competing software into the OS? Wasn't standard oil fragmented in part for receiving anti-competitive freight fares?

Couldn't it be argued that Google's featured snippets and accelerated mobile pages will lower the revenue of content creators and thus decrease consumer surplus in the long term?

Yes, what GP said is true, at least since the 80s. Before that, too powerful monopolies were considered bad for society; that's why Standard Oil was broken up. However, understanding of US antitrust law underwent a shift in the 80s - now a monopoly has to actively hurt the end consumer for it to be prosecuted under the Sherman antitrust act.

Could also be argued that Google AMP (Accelerated mobile pages) enables publishers to get SOME ad revenue in spite of rise of ad blockers. Thus mitigating, and dare I say using monopoly for some-what good-ish intentions?

I'm not a lawyer but I think what ultimately bit Microsoft was the fact that they were trying to contractually restrict OEMs from including alternatives (arguably harming consumers) and trying to argue that IE was part of the OS when there was evidence it was not. Certainly the settlement remedies after appeal primarily seem to focus on not restricting OEMs from installing alternatives.

Google lawyers have undoubtedly analysed the case with a fine toothed comb and would likely use the permissive open source licenses under which it provides Android and Chrome sources (and allows manufacturers to roll their own versions) to argue they don't restrict anyone.

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