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Comment by bduerst | Hacker News Reader

Google doesn't have a monopoly on search. Having a popular or high-quality product is not the same as having no competition. You can run an ecommerce business online entirely through instagram if you wanted to.

Amazon theoretically is abusing it's market power by being selective about which products it sells in it's stores. When they removed competing AppleTV/Chromecast products from their own and seller lines, to promote their firestick, that was monopolistic behavior. There's also arguments that Amazon is promoting their own line of products on their platform as well, by replicating products that end up being successful, but this is a new area for antitrust that needs to be sussed out.

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Google search has a 92% market share[0]

Microsoft desktop market share in 2009 was still over 90%[1]

Google search has no significant competition, much like Microsoft Windows had no significant competition.

[0] http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share

[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/...

Again, having a popular product is not a monopoly.

Monopoly is tied to access to competition. Monopolies have market dominance, but not all market dominant companies are monopolies. Windows was more of a monopoly in the 1990's because you went into a computer store and could typically only buy windows machines. This limits consumer options.

You can type https://www.bing.com into your browser right now, or any other number of accessible competitors, meaning that while popular, Google is not a monopoly. Consumers have a myriad of options and choose one because of it's quality, which is how competition on open markets work.

However, this argument falls apart when you look deeper into the fray of competition and examine barrier to entry.

Because so far search seems to be a self-perpetuating machine, it can be unfair to compare google and other searches as the amount of data Google already has could pose as an unfair advantage.

What if some other company had the same amount of data? Could they be doing a lot better job? Would the favor for google products dissapear?

really the entire concept of a 'store' has been bastardized by these companies (another thing we can thank apple for) and is a misdirect.

the locked down software platforms wherein users can't install anything on their own devices without the owning company's say-so is the artificial monopoly. they're trying to get away with adding things like device management now to weasel out of it but in reality these are artificially high barriers to entry for any competing software distribution services or 'stores'.

when Amazon can barely even get a foothold in a competing ecosystem with its own 'app store' you know it's anticompetitive and it's working.

Amazon can build their own phones and run their own store. In fact they did.

It’s just that their products were terrible and consumers didn’t want them. And the barrier to building your own ecosystem really isn’t that high anymore. We have hundreds of Chinese companies doing this today.

Agreed, and this is where some set of standardization is needed for antitrust law.

Store doesn't mean much. There needs to be a difference between hosting an online store that sells your own products and services, and hosting an online platform that sells your own things but also allows other businesses to sell on it as well.

The latter needs more guidelines on how the host ensures competition, especially when it starts to get market dominance and abuses control of the platform to promote it's own products.

Isn't that what Apple is doing in this case with Apple Music vs. Spotify?

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