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"The dominance of Google, Facebook and Amazon is bad for consumers and competition" ... really??

Yes, really.

The existence of monopoly or significantly market-dominating providers is definitionally a failure of competition.

I suppose you could argue about whether or not a competitive market is good, but I'm pretty sure it is.

I reacted more to the word 'consumers' than 'competition' as the competition argument comes back around to what's best for consumers anyway.

So I put my consumer hat on and pondered what would I rather have: - The current situation - Intervention

And I concluded I quite like the current situation, these companies provide meaningful benefits to me.

If I put my tin foil hat on, it seems quite obvious that 'bad for consumers' is what someone wants you to think, but it isn't entirely true.

>If I put my tin foil hat on, it seems quite obvious that 'bad for consumers' is what someone wants you to think, but it isn't entirely true.

Is putting your tinfoil hat on really a good way to get to the truth of any subject?

And you've concluded that because you prefer the current situation the situation faced by society or consumers is the same. And that's really just your opinion.

My opinion, for example, is that Amazon has obviously operated maliciously in numerous examples. Not calling 911 when their employee was suffering from the heat of its facility, leading to his death. Encouraging individuals to sell (generate markets) on the Amazon network then under-cutting or pushing out that small seller when there's revenue to be earned instead by Amazon. Encouraging waste and flippant purchases that are fulfilled in an inefficient and non-evironmentally friendly manner.

Amazon is Walmart, online. And neither organizations present long-term benefits to society, in my opinion.

Unfortunately, you may be happy with Amazon, but there's loads of examples of where this is going wrong for consumers. From issues with counterfit products (see the post recently about the guy who unknowingly was "charged" with import fraud and denied privileged flight status due to an Amazon order), to them taking advantage of the fact that people assume they're the cheapest price (they aren't always), to "prime shipping" becoming more and more of a thing you can't depend on (late shipments ... all the time).

Maybe you live in an area that Amazon gives higher priority to, maybe you live closer to a shipping center than I do, maybe the things you tend to order tend to be highly stocked in their warehouses ... I don't know, but the more time passes, the more Amazon frustrates me personally as a consumer, and others as well based on articles being written and social media chatter; which is frustrating, because the average national retail store is terrible (and they already killed all the mom n pop stores), and having to maintain accounts on lots of smaller online retailers is a pain (not to mention lax security can lead to stolen credit cards, etc). So obviously, in some ways, I agree with you because Amazon does provide benefits ... they just need to not be the only viable player in the online space.

What's best for consumers is having a variety of competitive choices: in the short term a monopolist can offer the 'one true best option', but over time they (like all companies) will stop acting competitively and then consumers will be harmed by the lack of other options.

That's why it is bad for consumers when monopolists emerge: during the emergence they likely do benefit, but it can take decades for a market to recover once the monopolist stops being competitive.

We're not to the point of nobody being able to compete with Amazon, though. Amazon is winning but other companies still exist and are fighting, so Amazon can't just raise prices arbitrarily and expect customers to not look elsewhere. Amazon has only benefited consumers so far.

Amazon is exterminating local businesses en masse and making trade deficits worse. People should reason past the end of their nose. Low prices aren't the only good in the universe; your money is now going out of your community to god knows where. You and your neighbors are getting poorer and poorer the more you consume and the less you produce.

This is the same argument against Walmart [1], and yet they continue to flourish too. You can argue all you want about how people should buy locally, support mom-and-pop stores, and keep their money in their community, but WAIT IS THAT A $80 FLAT PANEL HDTV?? At the end of the day the vast majority of people are going to go with the cheapest option.

1: (which, by the way, is huge and competes with Amazon, so I'm not sure where this "Amazon has no competition" meme comes from)

Yeah, I grew up in the midwest and I know the Walmart effect. I also see the midwest sucked dry by these and other stores. Track the money. It's not a net in-flow to the local community, even if you count externalities. Big corporations have hollowed out America. "It's economics". Indeed.

I also pine for the good ol' days of mom and pop stores being the primary retailers in the world, but the genie is out of the bottle and consumers have shown that they prefer the convenience and affordability of online shopping. Amazon has been happy to provide that thus far.

The argument I was responding to said Amazon is a monopoly that hurts consumers. I still contend that A) it's not a monopoly and isn't necessarily destined to be one, and B) it has not hurt consumers. Your argument is more about the social and economic implications of big stores in general putting mom and pops out of business, which is a whole different issue and involves more than just Amazon.

monopoly of what? their own product? so?

I can use any search engine I know about. how about just force every browser to present a random list of search engines for the user to choose and lock in. Heck we can make it round robin three of them.

Facebook is a monopoly of what? Facebook. Twitter is a monopoly of what? Twitter. How do you share a website with competitors?

amazon gets competition but only for those who know to shop elsewhere or refuse to shop amazon. heck google rarely gives me an amazon result for shopping. wal mart competes with amazon but there are those who will never shop there, even target competes but again, same thing.

Your third point is precisely why Facebook is a problem. For a person to be an active member of your community group, that person must join Facebook. To opt out of Facebook entirely becomes impractical.

True, it's the only reason I'm still using Facebook, but any alternative service would also require everyone to register an account. There is a strong competitor called Nextdoor but the privacy is even more concerning because they require your address and they share it by default (yes really!).

Seriously, all three of these could disappear tomorrow and the world is not coming to an end.

Amazon has robust competition both online and offline and I'm finding myself more often than not using better alternatives.

Google's services are high quality but most have decent drop-in replacements. For example, I recently moved all my E-mail off of Gmail and it was hassle-free. So far the most difficult part has been getting people to start using my new address.

Facebook I admittedly don't understand at all. Maybe I'm too old. I don't use it or even see a shred of value in it. To me it's an entirely optional service, and if it were to disappear overnight I literally would not notice.

With Google, I'm not sure; it gives good search results and experience, so I keep using it. If there's an alternative that does it better I might switch, eventually.

With Amazon it's a bit more malicious, in that they use their vast revenue and whatnot to force their prices below what any competitor could do, thus forcing them out of business.

Then again I'm sure that Google's acqui-hired any search start-up that might've become a competitor eventually.

How would it be considered malice to use your own revenue to sell things cheaper, while maintaining service and product listing quality. Are there any legal or ethical lines being crossed?

Running a few product lines at a loss is a classic way for a large company to put competitors out of business, in general terms. Once the competition is gone there maybe an opportunity for the remaining company to raise prices quite a lot.

> but their search engine is extremely useful

In some ways yes, but google's search and advertising monetization algorithms have a direct impact on the success of anything that depends on search ranking or ad monetization.