Hacker News Reader

Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

Apparently having a large market share in advertising also means that you somehow own communication.

Yes, a lot of people use Facebook and Google but that doesn't mean that there aren't 50 bajillion means of communication. Network effects are strong but ultimately they don't prevent you from communicating with anybody. The person on the other end of the line who has a strong preference for their chosen form of communication does. There's also basically no barrier to switch, I mean I've got 12 different messaging apps on my phone right now and it's not even close to a burden. And that doesn't even include email and IRC. And when it comes to broadcast communication which this article seems to be focusing on Facebook and Google are by far not the only sources of broadcast. Hell you should be looking at the consolidation of print and broadcast television if you want to see a true cartel on information distribution.

View on HN

This. Completely agree. Google out competed established search engines when it released. AOL & Yahoo were entrenched.

History flies in the face of what this article is trying to say. Tech giants can be out competed with new and better technology. It's that simple even though it's very hard.

Google and Facebook are not the 'monopolies' we should be focused on.

Verizon and ATT own the last mile and can literally shut down traffic to a site instantly at the network level! Talk about monopolistic power. Can't exactly out compete broadband unless you figure out how to network with muons or other subatomic particles.

> I've got 12 different messaging apps on my phone right now and it's not even close to a burden.

This might be a generational issue. I have older relatives who can't use more than one app. If at that. Maybe the people who complain about these things are just bad at discovering other apps and platforms.

> Maybe the people who complain about these things are just bad at discovering other apps and platforms.

Or maybe some people just want to keep their life as simple as possible, attention economy and all?

With my mid-30's I don't consider myself "that old", but just the idea of having to manage through a dozen different messenger apps is driving me super anxious just in the same way I like to have all my email accounts in one client/app and not spread across a dozen different clients/apps.

There's also something to be said about efficiency; Keeping up with a dozen apps (not just in content but also software version) is a whole lot more effort than doing it with just one app.

Maybe I'm actually that old? I just think simpler is usually better and to me, there's nothing "simple" about doing the same thing trough 12 different apps, to me that feels counter-intuitive and in the context of Internet communication, very archaic.

Nobody is requiring you to use 12 apps. The point is that there are 12 (and actually many more) apps that people could choice if they were in any way unhappy with their current choice.

Even search, where google has the clearest leads other offers exists.

You can not expect your definition of monopoly to be 'any costumer must be able to immediately switch service without any transaction cost on any of the many, many application any company provides'. That would be pretty insane.

> Nobody is requiring you to use 12 apps. The point is that there are 12 (and actually many more) apps that people could choice if they were in any way unhappy with their current choice.

I can only make that choice for myself, if my family and peers are on none of these apps, then what gain will I get from switching to them?

> You can not expect your definition of monopoly to be 'any costumer must be able to immediately switch service without any transaction cost on any of the many, many application any company provides'.

I didn't define any monopoly at all, I'm merely pointing out that there's something to be said about keeping it simple and "centralized" with certain things. This is also the same reason why Facebook is one hand good (one centralized place to handle all your online social interactions) but also bad (with that comes a lot of influence).

Why not look for solutions where we still have the advantage of aggregation, without the disadvantage of being dependent on a single party?

You can't just expect your own decision to change the market. There are of course network effects and eventually you have to make a choice if you want to support all clients and thus all people or if you don't want to do that then you have to make choices.

The point is that there are many networks and there is lots of competition on every level and as a costumer you have the choice how to organise your live.

> I didn't define any monopoly at all, I'm merely pointing out that there's something to be said about keeping it simple and "centralized" with certain things.

I agree, if the market is relativly free and a dominant player emerges, it is usually an efficent result, even if many people are not very happy.

That is why many free-market economist don't agree with the idea that anti-trust law is needed to prevent the centralisation that marx proclaimed and many modern progressive economists defend in new ways.

So I'm quite ok with one player, like Whatsapp, dominating for a time. For myself however, I dislike centralisation in fundamental infrastructure, so I make the personal choice to also have Signal, Matrix and many other chats. Depending on what group of friends I use a different app.

So we need to be carful with what are your personal choices and interest, and what are our acceptable market outcomes. Many people have a much to narrow view about how the market outcome 'should' look based on their assumtion of cost (typical example is transportation threw centralised nodes that many people think 'make no sense').

> Even search, where google has the clearest leads other offers exist

What are 3 or 4 alternatives?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com