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How Durable Are Information Monopolies On The Internet?

8 pointsby tavover 14 years ago

2 comments

Empactover 14 years ago
I saw Wu's talk at TEDxEast and came away unimpressed. Yes, you can compare some aspects of Google and Facebook to Standard Oil (e.g. network effects, economies of scale). But when he makes this connection, he leaves me wondering: if the problem of monopoly is abuse of market power, what happens when a monopoly results in little or none? What's a monopoly when the alternatives are abundant and the switching costs are next to nothing? If switching costs are nil, then even dominant players can't abuse their power without risking being cast aside, so you end up with very well-behaved actors, which is perhaps why Wu can't name any harms.<p>The point being that the old vocabulary doesn't necessarily have the same meaning in the modern context. Maybe all this time we should have been concerned with market accountability rather than market share.
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davidwover 14 years ago
Interesting question. Of course it's very difficult to do more than speculate because the internet as we know it (web, commerce, etc...) has not been around long enough to really give us a good idea.