90% of things mentioned here should be super illegal and the punishment should be 150% estimated income they achieved through such deals.
This isn't an "infraction" you can police with a fine, jail, etc. It's an industrial structure. The competition is competition for monopoly, a superior & highly profitable market position of some sort. Those are what make Google, FB & so profitable.
Google competed with Yahoo & Microsoft for years in search marketing. I don't believe either ever made significant profits. Their "market share" in terms of users may have been 10%-20%. But, their share of market revenues was a fraction of that. Their share of profits was negative.
OTOH Google pays (for example) Apple $7bn per year to make Google Search default. That's better than best case scenario profits MSFT or Yahoo could have hoped to make, unless they managed to replace Google in the no. 1 position.
Competing is just a lot less profitable than cooperating in a lot of cases. What is Apple supposed to do, say "keep it, we're good?"
I disagree - governments legislate their markets so it is absolutely punishable if defined as such.
just like parking /speeding tickets arent considered structural problems
I don’t see any of these two assumptions to be true today, and if the point is to apply heavy enough fines that Google’s behavior radically changes, we’re not that far from for instance just breaking them up or applying specific restrictions on them.
Right now, tech companies are massively overvalued because the risk of government regulation is viewed to be nonexistent. A market correction is overdue.
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/break-ups-and-stock-price...
The same could happen with big tech. The market correction could be upwards, just spread across lots of new stocks.
Many of our current, data & user centric monopolies are more complex. Price setting, monopoly rents and economies of scale exist, but they're often not the main point.
"Economies of scale," for example, tends to work backwards these days. Google & FB have access to a ton of advertiser-relevant data, and a ton of users. That makes one unit of Google output better, not just cheaper. The dollar value of a Google of FB ad is much higher than MSFT's or a 2nd tier social network.
It might also be cheaper to run, because of economies of scale. Often though, that's very "in theory." IRL, FB probably spends more per user than most of their competitors. They have it to spend. Reddit is a competitor to FB, for example. The defining aspect of "scale" in their rivalry is not that FB can spread their costs across more users. FB makes many times more revenue per user, because they are bigger.