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> Thanks to the trifecta of ubiquitous smartphones, pervasive Internet and no-holds-barred data mining, I'd argue that the tech landscape we inhabit today is very different from anything we've ever encountered.

Say a startup does create a better product than Google or Facebook, it can't charge for it, because everything is free. It certainly can't monetize it better than Google or Facebook because they have infinitely more data on users than any startup can even fathom. It has to go through Google's and Facebook's "gates" to find and retain customers.

Those precious few that do manage to pull off the impossible, like Whatsapp, will be quickly bought over by Google or Facebook. Thus closing off any gaps that existed in their defense and reducing the possibility of independent competition even more.

I feel like you just described the exact circumstances in which Google and Facebook came up in the world. Competing against huge entrenched interests, couldn't charge for their products, and remember that Brin and Page tried to get acquired and Zuckerberg refused many offers. If history had gone a little differently and had Zuckerberg changed his mind, both companies would be little more than footnotes today, absorbed into some existing behemoth. Meanwhile computing infrastructure today is far far cheaper at gigantic scales.

I don't think we can conclude much from the fact that very few companies become hugely successful these days; that's always been true.

> Merely that we need to do a comprehensive forward-looking analysis of Google's dominance, extrapolating from present data and trends. Using past data alone strikes me as lazy or self-serving

present data and trends are a direct result of the past, and while things do change, it's not clear that today is fundamentally different than 10 years ago and those aren't all still instructive examples (while remembering we're hopelessly under the foot of biased sampling here)

Past examples also such because they are bad examples. The Antitrust case against IBM was dropped because it dragged on so long and by the end IBM had lost the monopoly allready. The real story is the guy who was going after IBM died and nobody else was perticularly intrested in keeping it going.

The same goes for microsoft, I dont think the antitrust laws led to the weaker market position it now has. There product sucked, people moved on, and forced microsoft to up there game.

Internet Explorer had greater than 90% market share at the peak, and Microsoft was vigorously arguing that it was such an integrated part of the operating system that having a choice was impossible. The whole problem with monopolies is that it doesn't matter if their product sucks because you don't really have any other options. People can only move on if they have a choice.

I am somewhat amazed by how long it is taking the population to move away from Windows, now that there are real choices for mainstream users (Linux Mint, OSX). The look of Linux Mint feels especially Windows XP/7-ish, which is probably why I and others feel so comfortable with it.

Why would you assume that everybody wnat to move away from microsoft? Most people are ok, they dont have a deep hate for microsoft and just wait until they can move away from it.

I tried to get people other things but usually they just prefered windows in the end. Sure part is familiarity but not all of it.

I guess it's price (osx) and drivers (Linux). God, everyone would be much better off if we just moved to FOSS OS's.

The hole court case was about bundling, nowdays everybody does that. Can you imagen any operating system beeing sold without preinstalled browser?

Also how would people go about downloading the other browser if there was not internet explorer?

When apple had much of the smartphone market, there was not antitrust against them, but there was a browser on that phone. Also if you cant put any software on a computer you sell, then the logical conclusion is that we should only be allowed to sell pre installed kernals, everything else would be abusing monopoly position (assuming there is a high market share in the OS). Microsoft probebly had 99% market share in defragmentation tools back then as well.

The faulty assumition is that the product is the operating system, in reality the product is more then just the operating system its a hole bundle of diffrent software.

> The hole[sic] court case was about bundling, nowdays[sic] everybody does that. Can you imagen[sic] any operating system beeing[sic] sold without preinstalled browser?

The case was in the days when browsers were much less interoperable. There was a real concern that bundling IE would make it easy for MS to make everyone buy IIS, because that would be the best server to use to serve sites for IE.

It didn't turn out that way for a variety of reasons (among them the rise of Mozilla, impossible to predict at the time, and the amazing growth of Apache), but that doesn't mean the lawsuit was wrong, knowing what we did at the time.

> Also how would people go about downloading the other browser if there was not internet explorer?

ftp.mozilla.org or similar; BSD FTP ships with pretty much any computer.

Its the nature of markets and competition that you dont always know whats going to happen.

Is it your opinion that whenever something might happen, befor it actually happens the state should stop it? Thats kind like the movie minority report.

Even if that had happened, they could have forced the competition to be more like IE but they could still have added features.

It was the same with IBM, everybody was afraid they would take over the world and explained why they need to be stopped, but things happend and they didn't. Thats pretty much the story of every single case, were some tech company seams like its talking over the world. Knowdays facebook seams to be the big baddy that need to be stopped. People are just afraid because the dont have the imagination to draw up alternatives.

All I see its companys growing and shriking and in 99.99% of the cases it not because of some antitrust laws.

> ftp.mozilla.org or similar; BSD FTP ships with pretty much any computer.

How many people, non nerds, know what FTP is? How many know that the have a FTP programm on there computer and how many would have known were and how to look for other browsers?

> Is it your opinion that whenever something might happen, befor[sic] it actually happens the state should stop it?

No, it is my opinion that when a company deliberately tries to break the law, it should be prosecuted for breaking the law, even if what it was trying to do was actually futile. Just like it's still a crime to mug someone even if it turns out they don't have any money in their pockets.

> How many people, non nerds, know what FTP is? How many know that the have a FTP programm[sic] on there[sic] computer and how many would have known were[sic] and how to look for other browsers?

So you give them a friendly interface, like the browser choice screen that MS actually implemented.

Binding two of your products to gather is not breaking the law. Trying to achive suggess is not breaking the law. Every company is trying to break the law, because every company tries to get 100% market share. Every company tries to integrate there products with each others.

> So you give them a friendly interface, like the browser choice screen that MS actually implemented.

So Microsoft should give you a featrue to download from the competition. If anything the would just not tell anybody were the alternatives are and give people a easy way to download IE. So you would end up with the same problem, everybody would just be downloading IE.

It was enougth to give people access to the internet and everybody went and download the alternatives.

>Binding two of your products to gather[sic] is not breaking the law. Trying to achive[sic] suggess[sic] is not breaking the law.

Trying to exploit your OS monopoly to improve sales of your web server is breaking the law.

It turns out that anticompetitive, monopoly-maintaining behavior is breaking the law. It didn't used to be, which is why we got antitrust law in the first place.

Every company tries to gain market share, but society, which creates the markets in the first place, suffers if they gain too much. That's one of the structural problems of capitalism.

If we are in favor of healthy free markets, we can't stand by as they decay into monopolies, which are not markets at all.

But what you described is just economy of scale. It's not really all that different than a large factory being able to manufacture a product at lower cost than a small factory.