This is just false. bing.com exists. news.ycombinator.com exists. reddit.com exists....
> The fact that they show people's content without giving them page views..
This is just false. Google shows at most an excerpt (that is defined by the publisher) or a headline (on news.google.com). Unless you're talking about AMP, but that's a decision made by the publisher too.
I don't think the existence of other websites on the internet is not really an argument against Google being a monopoly. Without question, the vast majority of the population (outside China) uses Google. This means that the majority of people who use the internet are using Google as their method of accessing websites, and thus Google has an effective monopoly on what links people see (and thus by proxy what articles they read and what they think about topics).
I'm arguing all of this from a point of view where you don't really care how Google or anything behind the scenes works -- most people view Google as a utility that just tells you what "the internet" has to say on a topic. Given it's prevalence and significant impact on people's decision making, it should have far more accountability.
> Google shows at most an excerpt (that is defined by the publisher) or a headline (on news.google.com).
Google also has their Q&A thing where they parse the contents of web pages to answer questions you ask Google -- so you don't end up on the person who wrote the answer's website. I think that is pretty clearly an example of Google showing people's content without giving them page views (whether or not you agree that it is an issue).
If you’re going to base it solely off number of users then you’re effectively punishing businesses for being successful and NOT from harming consumers.
For instance, changes to PageRank have negatively impacted websites and business consistently in the past (so much that there's an industry around making pages cater to the whims of an unauditable algorithm -- SEO). I think the fact that websites obviously cannot just switch to a competitor (unless they want to stop catering to a potential market of 3 billion people) rules that as being monopolistic behaviour.
That's what I mean when I refer to a monopoly. If you have exclusive control over an algorithm that affects more people than any government body on earth, then you are a monopoly. Same argument goes for quite a few of their other products (if your personal mail server isn't effectively "blessed" by GMail you cannot communicate with the majority of internet users), but Search is the most obvious one.
Generally it's measured by the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index - HHI.
http://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share
https://www.statista.com/statistics/267161/market-share-of-s...
https://www.netmarketshare.com/search-engine-market-share.as...
I think that the percentage argument is not the only important thing to consider, there are other anti-competitive practices which (when practiced at a large enough scale) become a monopoly even if "only" 50% of people use the product (friendly reminder that 50% of internet users is more than a billion people -- much larger than the population of most countries).
My point is not that Google is doing something illegal (and thus arguing over the legal definition of a monopoly is not helpful -- just like arguing over the legal meaning of the US 1st Amendment is not helpful in discussions over the concept of free speech). I'm arguing that it is a monopoly in the ordinary meaning of the word, in that effectively everyone uses Google and Google exerts a massive amount of power over their users.
But for a pseudo-legal argument: Google participates in a form of product tying[1] by requiring you to create a Google account in order to access Google Groups (which are publicly-run mailing lists and an unrelated product to their account service). Now since you don't pay for Google accounts this isn't a strict violation of anti-trust laws, but it is very close in concept to the sort of thing anti-trust laws protect against.
100% certainly would.
> I'm arguing that it is a monopoly in the ordinary meaning of the word, in that effectively everyone uses Google and Google exerts a massive amount of power over their users.
What do you mean by "the ordinary meaning of the word" here? It's also not clear to me that "effectively everyone uses Google".
That seems to be false; I can read mailing lists hosted at Google Groups without logging in (for instance https://groups.google.com/a/groups.riscv.org/forum/#!forum/i... opens for me without asking for a login). I'm subscribed to that mailing list from an email address which is not a Google account, and I didn't have to log in to any Google account when I subscribed. I can post to that mailing list directly from a normal email client, through a non-Google email provider.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
It is defined by it's marketshare. And google search is by and large a monopoly in this regard having ~90% market share in virtually all segments of the market.
Yes, it is, though in practice that's based on complex factual analysis of whether there is real competition not whether there are other players in the same descriptive market.
> It is defined by it's marketshare.
No, marketshare is a “same descriptive market” test that people casually talking about competition use; legally, the more relevant tests are things like pricing power—can the alleged monopolist raise prices in some range without losing sales to a competitor. You can have a very large marketshare in a descriptive market but lack pricing power, or have small marketshare in a descriptive market and have pricing power because the market described is really multiple segregated markets in practice.
No, I can't agree. I don't even consider Microsoft a monopoly, even though their product comes pre-installed on every PC you can buy in shops. If you can't get any alternative ISP (to e.g. AT&T) where you live, by any means, now that is a monopoly.
It should be obvious that it's perfectly possible to define something as a monopoly in a certain area. If a monopoly could only be defined as a monopoly if it were global, there wouldn't be many.
