Part of the problem is that tech products tend to be natural monopolies. If you split android off Google, it will probably just lose out against iOS in the West and some Chinese Android version elsewhere. As the article says, that's not necessarily better.
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People say this but there's nothing "natural" about Google's monopoly, to get to where they are today, they had to make a dozen major acquisitions, and if the last few administrations hadn't been bought and paid for, the FTC could have said no to any of them. In particular they should have looked very very hard at Doubleclick. I mean who are we kidding, they should have said no to Doubleclick.
So we are in a world today where things like Android, Chrome, and the default search experience on an iPhone are all what they are because of Google's need to build moats around the GooDubClick cash cow. More importantly it's really hard to compete with these things unless you have a GooDubClick cash cow of your own, which guess what basically nobody does. Decouple them and that will start to change, there will be many businesses that will take all sorts of novel approaches, and that is what we refer to as "innovation" when we are being pragmatic and un-cynical about what innovation is, it's a dozen or a thousand companies throwing new stuff out there and sooner or later some of it sticks and the world changes.
NOTHING is natural about what Google is today unless you consider the FTC not doing its job for 15-20 years "natural."
As a European I’m still mad at the regulators for allowing Facebook to buy WhatsApp.
If the marginal cost of delivering your product is close to zero, markets will tend to monopoly. A search/ads company that has 10% of the market share that Google does (and no one gets even to that), has roughly the same costs but only 10% of the income (and only that if they are as good as Google is in making on money off search). On top of that, having access to the query stream is really important keeping search quality up.
> Part of the problem is that tech products tend to be natural monopolies.
Middleman platforms often become natural monopolies due to network effects, but how does this expand to tech products in general?
I don't see any structural incentives that lead to natural monopolies in search, email, or a wide variety of other products that Google is dominant in.
and other markets where network effects tend to create monopolies tend to be very highly regulated or state owned: telecoms and financial markets, for example.
Utilities are monopolies because it makes no sense to spend tons of resources running extra pipes and wires to each and every house. It’s called a structural monopoly.
Yikes! Yes. WIll correct. I do not know what happened to my brain there.
The issue is that acquisitions have been allowed. We(EU, USA, whoever) should have put stop on that long time ago.
Maybe even demanded that certain too effective components were separated like adds. Or with Amazon retail from AWS.
> tech products tend to be natural monopolies
Based on what evidence? Isn't the simpler explanation "VC wants big return; VC funds tech; therefore VC encourages monopolies"?
Network effects are just so strong. Once a particular option has ingrained itself for a particular use-case they can make it extremely difficult for any alternative to become viable even if it's technologically superior. Just look at Windows vs Linux.
Network effects are huge. Also consider the velocity of tech. A superior product can dominate the market in 10 years or less, where other industries take decades or more and first movers don’t get as far ahead.
Google has collected multiple businesses in its conglomerate structure that gives it far too much power and control over society beyond the simple monopoly charge.
YouTube, Search, Email, advertising, are all controlled by the same people and that is a problem for freedom and the economy.
All Androids out there are essentially major forks, all huge mobile vendors have their Android flavor.
There are giant incentives to keep the ecosystem as it is.
The ultimate goal of any breakup would be to promote competition and innovation... Will se how it'll end