Jess Bachman, who did several of the fantastic illustrations for Bailout Nation, turns his attention to Google. He whipped together this killer chart on whether Google is a monopoly:>
Click for ginormous graphic
By Scores
Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data, ability to repeat discredited memes, and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Also, be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor even implied. Any irrelevancies you can mention will also be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.
"Dollar depreciation leads to higher inflation and ultimately forces foreign creditors to question their rationale and indeed their sanity for continuing purchases of U.S. Treasuries." -Bill Gross
Signs continue that European markets are getting tired. The Spanish and Italian stock markets, big beneficiaries of the sharp decline in their bond yields over the past few months are falling to the lowest since Feb 1. The European bank index is at a 1 1/2 week low after earnings reports from Commerzbank and Credit Ag (RBS bouncing although reporting weaker than expected earnings) were disappointing. This market action is in spite of the German IFO business confidence figure which rose to a 7 month high coming in a touch above expectations and Italian consumer confidence which bounced more than...
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October 26th, 2010 at 12:09 pm
Any guesses as to what measure shows AT&T as the largest non-banking, non-oil company in the world? It doesn’t seem to be market cap, sales, or profits.
October 26th, 2010 at 12:11 pm
It doesn’t seem Jess Bachman knows much about Google’s search results. The results are based on buzz, not market share. When was the last time anyone really talked about Yahoo! Mail? The primary reason it’s still the largest email service is because it’s been around so long. There are plenty more articles and links to Gmail and that’s why Gmail gets the top search result.
I do agree Google search results should provide links to alternative map sources but YouTube is, in fact, the single site that should be above all others since it is, without a doubt, the most popular and most linked video site online. Even when it comes to maps, Google Maps is the dominant map service so I don’t see much monopolization. I guess what Bachman should be more concerned about isn’t monopolization but the tentacle’d mass that Google is. Maybe they should do nothing but search, if that’s the case.
October 26th, 2010 at 12:31 pm
It’s about tenacity of market share as much as size.
Google and U.S. Steel not easily comparable.
October 26th, 2010 at 12:34 pm
Google has competitors on the way in Twitter and Facebook and “social” search. It is a different type of search, by it will be legitimate competition that will draw market share and advertising away from Google.
October 26th, 2010 at 12:39 pm
The real test for me as a veteran of the networking industry is: do they control both content and the physical media (ie, the actual network)?
In Google’s case, the answer is becoming a huge “yes.” They’re rolling out their own physical network, they’re now involved heavily in wireless networking and smartphones, etc. Add this to their already pervasive content portfolio and they’re rapidly achieving monopoly status. The info-porn completely misses the boring physical network side of Google, BTW.
Add in their antics with sniffing email and passwords out of the air as they drive around in their Street View dorkmobiles and yea, I’d say that they’re rapidly acting like a monopoly, and a rather creepy (as in peeping tom creepy) monopoly at that.
October 26th, 2010 at 1:12 pm
Do they restrict supply? Does decrease of consumer surplus result in a deadweight loss? Those are the diagrams to review. There’s no evidence of that.
October 26th, 2010 at 2:32 pm
The question is whether Google operates in a market where monopoly is natural, i.e., in a market where the marginal cost of supplying an additional unit of output decreases throughout the quantity supplied curve. Communications infrastructure of all types–defense, roads, currencies, electricity transmission lines, computer operating systems–qualify as natural monopolies. It’s not clear whether Google’s main market in internet search is a natural monopoly. If it isn’t competing in a market that is naturally a monopoly, then even if it has some monopolistic characteristics, the market will quickly resolve any nefarious behaviors Google may adopt because of its dominant market share (which is only evidence that it may be a monopolist) by inducing competitors to jump in.
October 26th, 2010 at 2:38 pm
AT&T as the largest what? How would they classify Walmart?
As for AT&T, they had a choice…to keep “profitable, high growth” long distance or keep the “stodgy, slow growth” local business. They chose….poorly.
October 26th, 2010 at 2:46 pm
The author is asking the wrong question about Google by looking at its market share in search, maps, video, phone OS, mail, and the browser. Google is not in any of those businesses. Google is a surveillance and data acquisition company. Its customers are advertisers. What it delivers is surveillance data. Those various web applications are merely means to data acquisition. They’re not products and markets.
When it comes to selling data about people, Google has huge competition. The author should examine the market share for the various large surveillance companies and report back.
Google can still be guilty of anticompetitive behavior, of course. For example, it is illegal for GM to require that you use Goodyear tires on your car in order for them to do warranty service. GM certainly has no monopoly but that is still in an illegal anti-competitive practice.
October 26th, 2010 at 2:47 pm
Impossible. Monopolies actually pay taxes.
October 26th, 2010 at 3:12 pm
Yes.
October 26th, 2010 at 11:40 pm
Google is MOST CERTAINLY a monopoly.
http://www.philstockworld.com
October 27th, 2010 at 7:05 am
Absolutely fantastic chart porn.
A major difference which shouldn’t be overlooked is that Google offers end users free services. The same couldn’t be said for the companies that they are compared to on this chart – US Steel, Standard Oil, AT&T
October 27th, 2010 at 9:25 am
Nice graphic, except for the “it’s” vs “its”.
October 27th, 2010 at 1:25 pm
i always like to look at net profit margins in monopoly conversations. the higher the margin, the more likely i consider the concern to be a monopoly. dell and emc are certainly NOT monopolies.
2009 net profit margin
EMC 8%
Cisco 17%
Msft 25%
Oracle 24%
Dell 3%
Google 28%