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Comment by Hydrocarb0n | Hacker News Reader

Google is much bigger than a Monopoly, it is a multi-monopoly, Search, web ads, email, video, maps / nav, User data / metrics.

If you had told me in early 2000s that google would absolutely dominate all of these fields And it would be allowed to continue for decades, I wouldn't believe you.

I'm a free market guy, I believe some small gov is nessasary to regulate monopolies, protect constitutional rights etc, but multi-monopolies- I can't believe are allowed to exist under such a large beaurocratic superstate with left or right in power.

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Do you think the world benefits from this monopoly though? I think the world would be a worse place without Google, a much worse place. While it would be nice to live in some timeline were lots of choices for search (there actually are, people are just lazy and don't like change), but we built a world with Google and let it get to where its at. We will just be shooting ourselves in our own foot, at least in the short term.

We simply can't know if there would be better alternatives because of it. Any competition is acquired or dies and it has been like this for years.

But then again monopolies are the final form of capitalism so there's no real way to avoid them. Maybe on an utopia where we have strong regulations and can shield them from being influenced by money. Not gonna happen.

This argument is very similar to that for "enlightened monarch" kind of despotism.

The fundamental problem is that, even if you buy the notion that this particular ruler is really so enlightened that they are a net benefit, there's no guarantee that this will still be the case in the future.

So, even if you believe that Google provides net benefit today, letting them acquire more and more power is a bad idea because they aren't necessarily going to give you free things tomorrow. Indeed, the logic of capitalism dictates that they stop doing so as soon as there's no more competition, however small, that continues to contest that particular niche.

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