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Comment by nickpp | Hacker News Reader

Google is the best kind of monopoly: one sustained by the quality of the product. If there was a better competitor tomorrow, we'd switch in a heart beat and Google could do nothing about it. No consumer harm there.

Apple has created their own hardware platform(s) and it has a healthy competition for it. There are rules to be on it and they are mostly for the benefit of the consumer.

Facebook is simply a forum. If facilitating communication facilitates genocide and election interference it's people who are the problem, not Facebook. Besides, TV & Radio are much bigger facilitators for genocide and election interference and nobody attacks both.

Amazon - any physical retailer is both a market place and sells its own competing products crated using said customer data. Just visit any supermarket.

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> Google is the best kind of monopoly: one sustained by the quality of the product.

Oh now you've done it, there goes my tea and a keyboard. That was wildly funny, thank you. For a moment there I thought you were serious.

If you know of a better search engine, please name it. I would love to switch.

Do you not find value in Google's offerings? Do you know of better alternatives?

Just talking about Search: I've been using it daily for over 20 years now, I couldn't live without it and I know no better search engine, even though I would switch in a heart beat.

That same Google that uses their monopoly in search to push their other product lines? Such as Chrome, shopping, 'information snippets', news, social networks and a whole raft of other mediocre products that wouldn't even exist if not for their monopoly on search?

Not finding value in Google's offerings is not what it is about: it is about abuse of monopolistic power, and Google is very guilty of that.

We were talking about product quality... but OK.

While not exactly fan of Google pushing their other offerings, I still have to find someone who doesn't do that on their own properties. Even our office landlord keeps pushing us to rent some more parking spaces.

But that does not make it a monopoly and the very fact that those other offerings are unsuccessful shows that this behavior is not that problematic.

I am willing to put up with it if this means preventing yet another competition stifling, consumer harming, incumbent favoring - regulation.

one sustained by their own walls and that of frenemies: browser, OS, device. https://blog.mojeek.com/2021/09/multiple-choice-in-search.ht...

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