Comment by mjevans | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mjevans | Hacker News Reader

While I agree that completely dominating a given platform is probably concern for anti-trust investigation and/or heavy regulations to ensure //regulated access// to that platform, I actually disagree that Google is a monopoly.

Microsoft is still pushing Bing, and I think Yahoo exists; and both of those providers also provide free email services (some under different brand names).

Apple competes on entire phone platforms, and Android as an operating system for phones is provided free to enable a market place across several different manufacturer's devices; that is likely what's saving //Apple// as a monopoly for mobiles.

Amazon for shopping... the Whole Foods horizontal integration may be problematic. I think it depends on how different platforms and services are broken up. It would probably be OK with the correct kind of regulation to ensure that it isn't used as an unfair competitive advantage. In that respect I think Walmart might also have issues.

What I think might improve things is more consumer protections, particularly in the form of requiring reasonable cost access to paid support (even for products that are otherwise free). We've heard of users being locked out of their contact address and account data far too often, even for paying or previously paying users.

Ecosystems, man. Possibly way higher barriers to entry for new players than before.

Google partly defeated Microsoft's phone platform just by keeping their services away from it. It's difficult to imagine any less powerful player having any chance.

Think of modern consumer applications and how much they depend on technology from Google, Apple, Amazon or Microsoft.

They can at many points enforce incompatibility for business reasons. That should probably be disallowed (car makers couldn't really prevent after market companies from producing compatible parts).

Microsoft defeated their own phone platform by not having proper developer incentives/support.

Google's actions were still anticompetitive even if Microsoft's effort would've fallen apart on its own.

So if I create ShitPhoneTM you think google should be forced to develop apps for my phone?

If they dod not restrict web access then what they did is perfectly fine.

They paid devs and gave them Lumia phones. I still remember writing a trivial app for Windows Phone and getting $100 and a Lumia 521, which was pretty good IMO.

Google acted terribly towards Windows Phone, breaking Youtube and anything else 3rd party devs or Microsoft wrote for Windows Phone. Google Maps for mobile browsers was pretty awful until Google was sure that AT&T and Verizon were done selling Windows Phones

I've been wondering for awhile how Google gets away with their anticompetitive practices in terms of YouTube. They built a huge business on search advertising, and then turn around and use that to run a video distribution infrastructure for well over a decade at profound economic loss just to guarantee no one else could ever get investment to build a competing infrastructure. It's essentially impossible to get the billions of dollars necessary to build a global video distribution system if you have to tell investors that they need to be willing to lose mountains of money for perhaps multiple decades while they wait out Google.

For it being essentially impossible, its sure been done a lot: Netflix, MindGeek (NSFW), and Amazon definitely have at least as large video streaming (especially with Amazon now owning Twitch). There are a lot of large, though not really global, ones too (e.g., in the US there is Hulu, CBS, HBO, various sports, etc.). I'm not sure how big Facebook's video streaming (probably fairly large, considering its Facebook). Smaller YouTube-like sites exist; for example Vimeo is still around.

Building a video hosting site costs a lot less than billions. Unless you have YouTube's traffic, you don't need their capacity.

> and both of those providers also provide free email services

Even if you sign up for an alternate email service, the fact that Google controls so many email accounts means that it is still going to get to read many of the emails sent from Yahoo / Hotmail to Gmail.

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