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Comment by bconnorwhite | Hacker News Reader

The best thing about "tech monopolies" is that there are so many of them

Indeed, we should be talking about a cartel instead. Coordinated action, e.g. banning the same people / videos / keywords on the same day.

The problem is with word choice. "Tech" has little to do with the business domain.

True, but even after narrowing this, you usually end up with 3/4 of these companies in competition.

Messaging? FB vs Apple vs Google

Ads? FB vs Google vs Amazon

Video? FB vs Google (YouTube) vs Amazon (Twitch)

Especially re: Google linking to its own sites, are we now arguing Google has a monopoly over google.com? It gets a bit weird

That's only if you rig it by choosing the market to make it turn out that way. They aren't a monopoly in every market they are in. They're monopolies in specific markets. No company has ever been a monopoly in general, except perhaps the Soviet state but even that isn't strictly true.

Search? Google. Online retail? Amazon. Video hosting? Google.

> are we now arguing Google has a monopoly over google.com? It gets a bit weird

I don't know anyone who's arguing that. But I do see people arguing Google having a monopoly on search. In a lot of domains, a business can be created or destroyed entirely on their Google search rank.

Even if Google search was broken off to a standalone company, it would still have a monopoly on search.

The competition just isn't as good at search. Bing has been around for a long time and has managed to gain less than 10% of market share, even though almost everyone has heard of it.

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