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Comment by bsaul | Hacker News Reader

I’m pro europe, but let’s face it, if we can’t get any kind of cooperation between state members regarding taxes, then maybe it’s time to rethink the inside mechanicsm of the union ( which may include restart from scratch with fewer countries).

This revenue tax won’t change anything. It’s just ransom, and i hate feeling like my representatives make me look like a lazy thief.

I’d even prefer something like what china is doing : since google is a monopoly in europe, which makes it impossible for competitor to compete, let’s impose tarifs or prevent them from doing business in europe as long as they haven’t split, or a true local competitor has emerged. At least this would be very specific to one very particular case. Not the kind of gigantic tax on a whole economy.

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> if we can’t get any kind of cooperation between state members regarding taxes, then maybe it’s time to rethink the inside mechanicsm of the union ( which may include restart from scratch with fewer countries).

The problem is when things require unanimity. It's very hard to get all 28 countries to agree to something.

28 cultures is quite a lot of diversity to suddenly and forcibly slam onto a single party-line. Have you considered that maybe this collection of cultures might have values and methods that are sufficiently mutually different, that there often isn't a single policy that will satisfy all of them?

Here in the USA we have an analogous situation, but it is maintained - for at least a century and a half - with enough top-down brute force to keep the resulting tensions simmered-down such that they are only expressed via things like the "culture wars" phenomenon.

What does Google have a monopoly on? Do you not have access to iOS? Do you not have access to DuckDuckGo and Bing?

http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share/all/eur...

I don't think "monopoly" is best judged by "current market share", but by whether a) it's easy for users to switch, and b) whether having that market share is self-reinforcing in a way that prevents competitors from entering.

The parent's point was that a) is not true for Google as a search engine.

b) doesn't seem to be true either; while money and experience can make you provide better search results, you don't get an advantage just from a high current percentage of searches.

In a trivial sense you can "SilasX has a monopoly on SilasX's labor" or "Joe Schmoe has a monopoly on hot dogs sold at Elm & Main St". That's not the monopoly anyone cares about. What matters is whether it's difficult to bring online the alternatives to employing my labor or buying a hot dog in that vicinity. In that respect, Google's monopoly on search is not the worrisome kind of thing we associate with monopolies.

So what you're saying is it's easy to compete with Google and get some market share in that space?

No.

I'm trying to outline a useful definition of "[bad-]monopoly" that captures the stuff we generally care about when we worry about them.

It's important to have a definition that excludes "they're just unusually good and so people happen to be currently buying from them, purely as an issue of merit". (If Joe happens to be the best hot dog vendor on some intersection, that's different than if he can prevent others who want to from opening shop nearby.)

I said Google doesn't count as the kind of bad-monopoly because they're easy to switch away from, and the market share isn't self-reinforcing.

It doesn't follow that Google is easy to take market share from. That could be the case of "legitimately good at what they do", and is not how you should define a worrisome monopoly.

A company being so good that others can't gain market share isn't (necessarily) a bad-monopoly. Only if that difficulty came from the factors above, would it count as a bad-monopoly.

(Those factors being the vendor lock-in and the self-reinforcing aspect.)

He's saying that (1) they have a horizontal monopoly, but not a vertical one. And (2) the monopoly is due to Google's quality. Should they do a subpar job, they would be disrupted.

You are a lot more economical with words than me :-)

b) whether having that market share is self-reinforcing in a way that prevents competitors from entering.

The argument is that large market share cause user capture. It is relative trivial to bring online an alterative youtube, but video creators can't switch unless the audience also switch and the audience can't switch unless the creators also switch. A subpar job by youtube won't automatically mean that competitor can disrupt, and a lot of users, content creator, advertisers, basically every type of users has been cited as disliking youtube but being locked in with no realistic alternative.

a) it's easy for users to switch

For google search, online stores that use google for advertisement and getting new customers can't easily switch as that would result in abandon 90% of new customer. They can't just buy their hot dog elsewhere. Online stores have to deal with google, unless their customer base is located elsewhere.

I was addressing search, not advertising or video hosting.

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