With Amazon dominating retail, and Facebook under its various brands dominating social media, there isn’t much scope for other players.
I don’t see another option than breaking theses companies up at this point.
Like if you’re looking to regulate a market this seems like one of the last you’d peg as not being healthy.
Amazon was there first, but it's getting cheaper by the day to buy a bunch of hardware, stick it in an increasingly cheaply electrified building, run a bunch of fiber to it and slap some virtualization software on it.
Amazon can read your secrets.
Can you share how you know this to be true?
I certainly hope it's true, but I have no way of knowing myself.
In New York we have almost as many ESCOs as there are shady looking prepaid phone cards. Maybe they save you 0.001% over the real electric company if you cash the check for 78 cents they send you every six months.
I thought the point of that was financial engineering. Used to be if you wanted to shut down a coal burning power plant the power company would be sued by creditors. Now the creditors can sue a shell company with no assets and get nothing.
It is good that coal burning power plants are being shut down, but rather than having an engineering or environmental based plan they do it this way. There will be plenty of money for solar roofs if they government is paying but private money will not be there for other investments if it doesn't have to be paid back.
They buy a lot of dark fiber, and IRUs, and wavelength services from carrier-of-carrier type big ISPs, but by no means do they control the internet.
But they are not in the same business of long distance OSI layer 1 ISP operations as CenturyLink/level3, zayo or Verizon are. Where I would be really worried is if I saw amazon making a serious bid to acquire a company similar to Zayo, NTT, KT, France telecom/opentransit, or Telia.
I guess that a state owned company would willingly be sold by its owner because states urgently need money.
For example Orange sa (ex France telecom) is owned at 25% by the French state and French state just had passed a budget which is financed at half by debt (2021). Selling a company for $b30 would provide some relief in 2021 budget.
[0] https://www.infrontanalytics.com/fe-en/FR0000133308/Orange-S...
For example Google has tried to provide free Wi-Fi, at the time some people were afraid it would be some rehearsal for a Wimax deployment, it never happened.
8 years ago, Google made a lot of noise with their high altitude platforms (their so called balloons). They met some Telcos, but it went nowhere.
Long time ago Google had also a project to provide phone calls with interesting fees. It was a MVNO in practice but it never got traction even if Google had access to an incredible number of Android users.
Show me one FAANG with anything even 5% of the outside plant wholly contolled fiber route miles of the size and scope of the railway ROW sprint, qwest and level3 networks. Or legacy wiltel.
The only real exception, Google has successfully made a big deal of itself in submarine fiber by throwing its money and weight around.
Using jio as an example of "why don't the faangs just build their own massive ISPs at OSI layer 1 by throwing money at it" is so dreadfully wrong and misinformed I won't even dignify it with a further response.
Google can now dictate which webshop is shown first in search results on a product level.
I know retailers are sick of this. They need Google to be found on the web but they don't like how Google is destroying retail.
Its hard to see right now but history tells us it will come and they will fall, every incumbent always gets complacent and stops innovating and someone comes and cleans up. For example YT hasn’t fundamentally changed in a decade, and the user experience is starting to feel a little off (sponsored content, a gamed recommendation algorithm etc. are all degrading the experience).
I don’t know how / where we’ll consume the bulk of our video in 2030, but there’s a significant chance it won’t be YouTube.
Yes
The technological difference, which may be underappreciated, is the AI/ML enabled discovery feed. TikTok learns what you like very quickly as you mindlessly scroll through infinite reels of content.
Walmart is still 2x the size of Amazon in terms of revenue, and like Bezos said in his congressional briefing, it's easier and cheaper to build and online platform than it is to build out Walmart's existing physical retail presence.
Walmart supports 3rd parties as well I think.
We can always narrow things into absurdity to imply a monopoly. But as a matter of fact, Amazon isn’t a monopoly in retail, or even online retail. To give an anecdote of my online buying in the past few months: I bought furniture from Crate and Barrel and Design Within Reach, in-line skates and street hockey gear from Pure Hockey, pilot supplies from Sporty’s, a silly tshirt from some random Facebook ad/vendor, some paracord and survival water from Amazon, an aircraft emergency raft from some raft company in Florida, some Surefire flashlight batteries from Amazon, a piece of furniture from Wayfair, sunscreen from the Sun Bum website.
I know not many would care what I bought over the past few months, but without even consciously trying, Amazon was just a part of my normal shopping mix, not even a majority of purposes were from there and the dollar amounts were even smaller of my total shopping spend.
Of course there are people that use Amazon more frequently and regularly, but that doesn’t make it a monopoly. You can easily buy from other places. Amazon retail is really nothing more than a highly efficient version of Sears. Ubiquitous, but hardly a monopoly.