Editor’s note: This article was first published in November 2010. This opinion piece reflects 2010 market positions (Yahoo and Bing as Google’s rivals, Facebook, eBay, Microsoft versus Apple) and the US debate. Google has since been fined by the European Commission for abusing its dominance, and a US court ruled in 2024 that it illegally maintained a search monopoly.
In the United States, the “monopoly” effect on the internet has been debated for months, and the verdict has been negative, since people there believe that monopolies are no good at all. In a way they’re right, although in my personal opinion we’re not talking about a monopoly like the ones we’ve seen until now.
On the internet everything works differently. While it’s true that there is a monopoly among the big players when it comes to search and social networks, it’s also true that this monopoly benefits the smaller businesses trying to carve out a place for themselves in this era of new technologies.
Google dominates search, Facebook leads in social networking, eBay sets the rules for buying and selling online, and Microsoft and Apple are fighting to dominate operating systems. Call it a monopoly if you like, but this monopoly has formed in just 10 years, with products and services that nobody wanted to develop back in the day.
Google is essentially accused of having no competition for its advertising system, Google AdWords and Google AdSense, because it is the number one search engine. The only exception is Yahoo‘s equivalent system, which, frankly, brings in about as much advertising revenue as Google spends on paper for its printouts.
When a monopoly is broken up, smaller companies are let in; from what I’ve seen, that much is clear. If Yahoo and Bing want a slice of the internet search pie, I think they need to improve their page indexing considerably, because from what I’ve seen they’re light years away from achieving the kind of order Google has achieved.
I’m absolutely sure that many users and authors of blogs or websites don’t like Google dominating the market, because if we ever have a run-in with Google, we’ll simply disappear from the internet. But let’s be realistic: if people use Google, it’s because it has never stopped innovating, and right now it has more than earned the top spot.
Ten years ago Google changed the lives of many people and the way business is done. It was followed by its biggest rival, Facebook, which has changed the way we communicate with our friends and made it possible today for a company to be visible worldwide for the price of being visible in its own province.
Monopolies are not good, I completely agree, but for the first time in history the internet monopoly is dominated by companies that have proved far superior to the rest and are still light years ahead of their competitors.
A monopoly occurs when competitors are prevented from entering, and in this case the internet market is open to any company, since it’s the customer who chooses a given service. So in this business, as in any other, the best one wins. In this particular case, the companies that make up today’s internet monopoly are the ones we chose ourselves. They arrived after the existing companies that offered the same service, “unimproved” and complacent. Those companies sat back, their new rivals overtook them, and internet users made their choice.
Further reading
- Google in talks with film studios to reverse the movie business’s decline
- Social media use at work: distraction or productivity?
Featured image: Szilveszter Farkas, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr.
