If they are, they are not a traditional monopolies.<p>Traditional monopolies "control supply of a good or service, and where the entry of new producers is prevented or highly restricted."<p>In this case, the supply of a good or service (social networking, webpage indexing and searching) are not controlled by Facebook and Google because they aren't finite resources. Anyone can index the web and anyone can build a social network and Google/Facebook aren't going to crush you with lawsuits or some other nefarious tactic to maintain their position (AFAIK). Entry of new producers of these services is not prevented or highly restricted. New social networks and search engines pop up all the time.<p>What Facebook and Google have is massive, large scale user loyalty. Despite alternatives existing (Bing, Mastadon, DuckDuckGo, Myspace, etc.), users are voluntarily choosing to use Google and Facebook. This is not a monopoly, IMO.<p>I think we need a new term for this situation.
Here's the question you need to answer. If they are evil, can they cause a lot of harm that will be hard to protect against or correct? If so, then it matters.<p>Google and Facebook both want to be publishers when it suits them, and common carriers when it suits them, and both have shown, I think we can all agree, a propensity to be evil. I think it's telling that Google retired, "Don't be evil."<p>I think Google is worse in that regard since they are so much more pervasive. It's easy enough to permanently opt out of Facebook, but to avoid using Google is difficult, if not impossible.<p>The other question is that do these companies allow for competition, not that they are necessarily explicitly preventing competition (although they may be), but whether or not they are so successful and have so much of a market share that it is literally impossible to compete with them, and again, I think the answer is yes. We see new competitors for Facebook on almost a weekly basis, and none of them ever get anywhere, not because of whether or not they are any good, but the fact that they can't compete because pretty much everyone who isn't actively boycotting Facebook is on Facebook (including me).<p>As far as Google goes, the best we can hope for the is someone to be able to compete with them in one particular area, and even that would be tough because Google, like Microsoft or Apple, can throw so much money at a project that it can succeed as a loss leader by simply outlasting any would-be competitor.
I think their behavior matters more than their market share. As other commenters pointed out, defining market share of an infinite resource is not very useful.<p>These companies buy potential disruptors at inflated prices. Sometimes they shut the disruptor down to maintain the status quo; sometimes they guide the disruptor to create a new market. In either case, it creates a positive feedback mechanism that increases their influence and further entrenches the parent company in their customers' lives.<p>As a market (and governed society) we need to decide if this is something that we want or not. It may be too late for pure market pressure to stop this behavior, leaving it to regulators. Or we can decide it's acceptable and let it go for the benefit of the innovations that these companies create.<p>I don't know if monopoly is the right word for this, but it's something and it does matter.
Of course it matters because these companies play a huge role in how we use the internet. Facebook is creating a walled garden for their users where they want to have their own closed version of the internet that they control. Google wants to become the gatekeeper of the internet and get to decide what websites people can view. AMP is a perfect example of Google using their monopoly power to force websites in that direction.
Currently also on the front page of HN:<p>- #5: Facebook reportedly discredited critics by linking them to George Soros (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18460406" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18460406</a>)<p>- #10: Facebook’s weapon amid chaos and controversy: misdirection (<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18460962" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18460962</a>)
Not strictly monopolies, but they are so large they can move capital around making many services/products artificially cheap for the client. In my opinion this makes competition unfair and constitutes a monopoly in some sense.
Oh boy - it's that time again.<p>Time for a bunch of people with no competition law or economics background to get upset over the term 'monopoly'.
At this point, Google in many cases offers the best service: DuckDuckGo is good, but Google is better. It is so good that it indexes the CIA's stuff: <a href="https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/416215-cia-operations-in-iran-china-compromised-for-years-because-of-hubris-and-a" rel="nofollow">https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/416215-cia-operations...</a><p>This is without even considering google dorks, possibly one of the most powerful tools infosec researchers (or even average people) have to refine queries.<p>In the case of Facebook, it offers the best product because its product is really people (the whole "you-are-the-product" issue). Facebook has the most people, therefore the best product.<p>Offering the best product is not a monopoly. Don't forget that MySpace was "the" social network before Facebook, but was displaced. These are not necessary traditional monopolies, and therefore should receive consideration on how they should be treated.
I don't get the point on complaining over the "mindshare size" of the faang products. As, I don't think it's a thing you can complain about. If it were, the french would be right to complain about English mindshare globally (they can complain but they can't sue). Also, you can compete locally with faang, like China and Russia are doing. Admittedly they use restrictions on foreign tech, but you also need to have high quality products that are catering for the local market. EU are the ones that feel uncomfortable being dominated by US tech companies, but it's not like they don't have options.
I don't think they are monopolies.<p>I use DuckDuckGo for search & Twitter for social media. I find discovering new things/People on Twitter more interesting than the sclerotic family/friends stuff on Facebook.
Meanwhile, FTC employees are sleeping their way to the bank, as they seemingly couldn't care less. Let's hope that the EU finds some inspiration.
I'm old enough to remember when IBM was the unbreakable monopolist that would rule the computer industry forever.<p>Then Microsoft was the unbreakable monopolist that would rule the computer industry forever.<p>Now it's apparently FAANG.<p>Just the fact that we have <i>five</i> monopolists should be enough to show thinking people that it's not a monopoly situation, if history isn't convincing enough.
Google and FB generate superior returns which should attract new entrants by definition. Which is not really happening because of structural and strategic entry & exit barriers. Network effects, economies of scale, switching costs, etc. Google and FB are not getting disciplined by hit and run competition, its an uncontested market.
You can consider almost any large company a "monopoly" if you define the market narrowly enough. I'm not convinced that this is a useful exercise.
The comments in social media related to the issue get repeatedly stuck into the term monopoly usually in the title in the article. This happens again and again. Please everyone. Get over it.<p>The context is monopoly power, market failures, unfair competition and antitrust law.<p>Networked plaform technologies are very different from traditional monopolies: zero price, increasing returns, imperfect competition, spillovers everything is very different
I guess we won't know for a few years still, but it seems like we're seeing the decline of the Facebook monopoly now. At least in terms of Facebook.com, maybe not all the things they own, but just Facebook as a social site. There seems to be soooo much going wrong for them on so many levels right now, it would surprise me if we're still talking about them in the same terms in 3-5 years.
What matter are laws that are making harder to compete with them.<p>Thanks to GDPR, you’ll probably never see a fb competitor emerge in Europe for example.
Google is trying to be "the academic company". As a result, it has infiltrated and infested UC Berkeley, Stanford's main competition (Google is a Stanford company).<p>There is no place in the private sector for wannabe universities. We have real universities for that. Greed and knowledge do not mix.
These companies could disappear over night. Is being a monopoly for a decade really a big deal? It's completely over hyped how much control they have, for now they are dominant, but five years from now its entirely possible that they arent. Also, they have produced so much for the world of technology, essentially creating all of the big data infrastructure technology, and (bare with me here) react which is having a material impact on the terribleness of front end frameworks. The deep learning revolution was started by cheap compute which sprang out of google. This whole monopoly business is so overplayed.