Isn't it a good thing for everyone if Google has Monopoly? | Hacker News Reader

Isn't it a good thing for everyone if Google has Monopoly?

1 pointuser-on15 comments

If Google has Monopoly in more areas like

Real Estate

Construction

Healthcare

Wouldn't those industries be more efficient for end customers?

View on HN

No one (except, possibly, the monopolist) is better off when monopolies exist

How well have [effective] monopolies on internet or cable services worked-out for you?

Speaking of monopoly in general may be out of scope of this post. But If Google can attain Monopoy wouldnt it do more good. Alphabet can be making 10x more revenue if they start charging for all the service they provie, but they seem to be happy with making reasonable profit which in their case ended up being huge. The leadership of the organization which attains monopoly is key here.

The monopolist, for some time, may "do better" than in a competitive market.

But unless they continue to act as if they're competing, they will stagnate.

Remeber AltaVista? The amazing search engine from DEC? No? Why? Because Google.

Just in the search space, there are many "better" search engines - which is why Google, to continue with this exemplar, is NOT a search engine company .. they are an advertising company which happens to have a good search engine, decent mobile OS, good enough map apps (they do own Waze, after all), great social network, etc

The advantage of the ecosystem Google has is they can be "good enough" in several areas that have far better individual options: but DuckDuckGo, for example, doesn't have a web-based office suite. Or a mobile OS. Or a maps service. Or a browser. Or. Or. Or. Or.

It is the ecosystem that ties people in. (No doubt, Apple, Microsoft, and others have various takes on the whole ecosystem thing, too - I'm just sticking with Google because it's who you singled-out.)

I rarely hit "google" when I "google" - I find results off DDG, Bing, and Qwant are "better" (and have each as the default search provider in different browsers).

What, inherently, makes you think Google (or any other company) would (or does) "do good"? Companies exist for one purpose - maximizing shareholder value. So long as they don't run [too] afoul of the law, they'll operate in more-or-less whatever manner they can, by-and-large, that accomplishes that end goal.

And who gets to decide your mythic "reasonable profit"? You? Me? "The government"? Some other external organization? Is it 10% net profit? 30%? 50%? 80%? 255%? How is that number decided upon? Why is it that value and not some other value? What happens if "reasonable profit" is defined as 30%, but they happen to make a profit of 40% this quarter/year/etc? Who gets to decide where that "unreasonable" percentage goes?

And sure, you might happen to get a "BDFL" in charge of the company ... today. What about tomorrow? It's the age-old problem with absolute (or near-absolute) monarchies / dictatorships /etc: you might get a Marcus Aurelius. But you get Nero, too.

There's not much historical evidence I know of that shows monopolies are more efficient or strive harder to benefit their customers.

That's not to say that they don't provide benefits. There are lots of examples of that, but more often they tend to squeeze the most out of their monopoly and ignore looking into providing newer, better, and less costly services.

Consider Sears & Amazon. There's no good reason why Sears didn't evolve into an Amazon like business model except they didn't have the vision or motivation to embrace change.

If you read Theodore Houser's book, "Big Business And Human Values" you'll see how different the company became after they went public (it was employee owned when he ran it).

I suspect that to a significant extent both Google and Amazon are still controlled by those who got them where they are, and this is why they aren't squeezing as much profit out of revenue and instead reinvesting much of it in acquisitions and development.

When or if they ever become entirely owned by investors is when they will start to decay, just like Sears.

Google is not a non-profit, they can and will do anything to make a profit. If they have a complete monopoly there's no reason to keep prices competitive, because there is no competition.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com