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Comment by fault1 | Hacker News Reader

Isn't this just a market opportunity for other companies?

Google isn't the only company that owns the field of information retrieval. They just came the right place/right time after the .com crash.

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There are a couple problems with the "market opportunity" argument. The first is that no, there isn't a market opportunity due to network and monopolistic forces. The second is that there is a fundamental issue with the system itself, whereby both state and private establishment players eventually force any player with a large piece of the market to do things like censor certain narratives.

While I agree that network effects play a large role in entrenchment, I wouldn't be so surprised if smaller players start swooping up the dissenters and begin slowly chipping away at the giants.

Monopoly power and political access means you can both strangle your competitors in the grave and then use regulatory capture to regulate them out of competitiveness if they survive your initial choking attempt.

Time it right and you can have a set of regulations tailored to your competitors that only minimally impact you and then, when the next party gets its turn at power and all of your competitors are dead, get those regulations removed in the next big wave of corporate deregulation.

It really is a sweet game. Too bad we'll never get to play it.

In principle, yes. But Google seems to hold a unique position because of network effects. Countless YouTube clones have been created but none ever seem to gain enough critical mass to become viable competitors. Trying to build a competing platform on the value proposition of being anti-censorship is also fraught with perception issues.

I mean, not just perception issues, but also the fact that you're inherently setting yourself up to build a platform with a core userbase of "People banned from [the more popular version of the platform they're cloning]." You build VidMe and the first people interested in VidMe are people that got kicked off of YouTube, which it turns out are rarely oppressed free speech advocates and much more often trolls and similarly unwanted individuals. If your userbase is entirely toxic, nobody wants to stay there, and your platform never really succeeds because of that.

It's worth noting that I'm loosely parroting the content of a Folding Ideas video[1] that covers the discussion of the creator vs platform relationship overall.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3snVCRo_bI

It is in a perfect market, but Google holds the monopoly and the game is set against competition.

A monopoly for information retrieval? Surely not.

For online ads? Sure you can make that case.

Their business in the end is based on delivering relevant content. If there is a market for the traffic Google refuses to host, then there are probably market opportunities there.

For video-sharing platforms.

1. When you buy an Android phone there's a good chance that YouTube app is preinstalled.

2. If you search the net for "how to do XYZ" or for any song you'll get 99% video results from YouTube.

3. Almost every company/celebrity/influencer/... has a YouTube account and until recently (TikTok, Odysee, BitChute,...) alternative platforms (Vimeo, Dailymotion,...) were mostly a niche market.

> Isn't this just a market opportunity for other companies?

Perhaps but that doesn't preclude criticizing those editorial choices as harmful (false narratives, ideological bubbles, general free-speech principles).

Are you going to vote with your money and pay for such a company to exist is the right question I would say.

And how is it a fair market when the government subsidies give google et al a home field advantage?

government subsidies?

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