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I agree Facebook isn't a great example of a monopoly. But consider Google. As it stands google is very much a monopoly in the sense that Microsoft was. The power google has to do good/bad is tremendous.

Consider your reliance on google: - search - email - maps/navigation - youtube, news, your browser - possibly your phone OS, contacts, calendar

Google hasn't really done anything too overtly Orwellian (e.g. only promoting news that shows it in a good light). It even hasn't been too restrictive on interoperability (but neither was Microsoft, it just came pre-installed with IE).

So I suppose the question becomes "Should power be broken up preemptively?"

Or, perhaps politicians are rightly scared as they understand that they are losing political control to a technological system (they don't control) that increasingly has the power to shift public opinion (now that TV is dead).

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> Consider your reliance on google: - search - email - maps/navigation - youtube, news, your browser - possibly your phone OS, contacts, calendar

Owning lots of different properties that each have serious competitors is not a monopoly.

The only market you can reasonably claim Google has a monopoly in is search. There are fair arguments that search is a natural monopoly, but trying to regulate search as a utility is a very bad idea, because it's bare naked government regulation of speech.

If you want more search competitors, a better approach might be government grants to improve public domain search algorithms so that it becomes more practical to create viable search competitors.

The problem is they use search and advertising to promote their other properties. So, simply removing that connection by splitting the company into 2-3 parts would do a lot to minimize the harm.

I would suggest: Search, Addwords, Everything else.

PS: Picture how much a 24/7 worldwide ad on googles home page is worth. Except the only customers for that are Google Properties.

It's not searh itself that lends itself naturally to monopoly - it's indexing. Indexing the billions of web pages that make up the open web is extremely expensive (and sometimes not allowed for anyone but google...). Moreover, it is silly to have 15 different companies performing indexing when just one could do it.

Fortunately enough, regulating indexing wouldn't entail an encroachment on freedom of speech, since an index should be raw and unfiltered. It also wouldn't require the government to take full control of google - they could merely require that google license their index to other searh engines at a reasonable cost.

Search not so much.

Ads. This is a problem area for Google. If I worked at Google figuring out an alternate revenue stream would be high on the list of things I'd be proposing for discussion at the very least.

>but trying to regulate search as a utility is a very bad idea, because it's bare naked government regulation of speech.

The hard and expensive part is building the index. Treating that as a utility that lots of search engines can hang off (in much the same way DDG hangs off bing) has none of the implications for freedom of speech.

Microsoft did a lot to restrict you from switching. I used to work at Microsoft. The reason the govt had somewhat of a case against them was the tactics microsoft did. Some examples:

1. Fixing their os in certain ways to hurt end user applications. we said "dos isn't done till lotus doesn't run". This was so customers would be unhappy with lotus, and use excel. People still said this after ms moved on to win 95.

2. Bundling os charging - if a company pays a flat fee per computer shipped, regardless of os, msft would charge them much less per copy. This discouraged companies from shipping other os', because they already 'paid' for windows, it cost them less to ship it.

With IE, they did mange for many years to make web development dependent on ie 5 to properly render. eventually this was broken away, but it was a huge long slog. It discouraged people from using other browsers for sure, but massively discouraged people from using other os' that didn't have a windows browser. like linux, phones, mac

Google doesn't have a monopoly on any of those things though. I don't use any Google products and I don't notice any issues living a modern life. There are lots of good competitors out there. The one exception is YouTube, there is a lot of quality content that is hosted there and no where else. Plus it's the closest thing Google has to a successful social media property.

I tend to lean towards your latter explanation. I think these are warning shots from a political elite that's suddenly paying close attention to the fact that powers moved about a bit without them noticing.

Personally I think if Facebook and google were one company then that would certainly be a company that needed to be broken up, but they're not, Google owns search, it doesn't own Social, Facebook owns Social but it doesn't own search, while neither owns the other there is no monopoly on the dissemination of information.

> Google hasn't really done anything too overtly Orwellian (e.g. only promoting news that shows it in a good light).

Well, they already are...

https://pjmedia.com/lifestyle/2017/09/11/report-google-bias-...

Wow, this is a horrible graph: https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/media-pg.... Forbes and CNBC are apparently liberal media and WSJ is conservative? Also from the article:

> There's no way to know whether a drop in search traffic is a result of changes in user behavior (i.e. fewer searches for a particular topic) or even the result of changes to the back or front end of a website (Google is reportedly cracking down on interstitial ads). Goldstein concedes at the end of his paper that the "PGSTN of individual domains is not sufficient for conclusions."

The plot in the linked article gives so little information that it is absolutely useless at concluding any sort of bias. It does establish that there is a trend, with higher referrer traffic to sites identified as left/liberal. In order to establish bias, this would need to be identified as something intentional and inaccurate on the part of google.

What differences exist in user patterns? Do users of conservative news typically browse certain websites, while users of left-leaning media search for articles?

No attempt was made to look at the relationship between website size and google referral traffic. Glancing at the websites listed, most of the conservative sites are much smaller, and so I would expect them to have lower search rankings and referral traffic as a result.

If you call that Orwellian then I think you need to use your imagination a little. This company has most of my passwords, my emails, my 2-factor, the accounts to which I reset my bank/investments, my credit card and other PII, my voice (google now), my physical fingerprint (unlocking my phone), knowledge of all of my close associates, and sits between me and all my online activity (chrome) or cellular activity (phone).

Would you consider it Orwellian if said company shut off access to your email, de-monetized your YouTube Videos and for all intents and purposes killed the account with all of the info you described above? Because Google has begun doing just that to those who hold a differing opinion from Google HQ. Jordan Peterson is a fairly good example of such an instance http://www.torontosun.com/2017/08/01/free-speech-advocate-jo...