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| Authored by: deck2 on Tuesday, October 23 2012 @ 09:26 AM EDT |
The problem I am seeing in this sub-thread is that of assuming monopolies in and
of themselves are illegal or wrong. It is dependent on how a monopoly came into
being and how the company that has it uses it.
A monopoly in a market that is gained by the superiority of the product is
neither illegal nor wrong. If the company then lets this monopoly be benign,
that is fine. If however it uses its monopoly in one market to take over
another market, that is where the line is crossed. Even here though there is a
grey area.
Microsoft's overt abuse of its monopoly in the PC OS market to leverage the
office products and Internet browsing markets is where it went wrong. If it had
not done what it did with respect to Netscape but rather built a standards
compliant browser that worked well there would have been no problem. If MS had
not had "secret" APIs that improved the performance of its office
products over competitors there would not be a problem.
Google is under the microscope since they have gained a near monopoly in the
search engine space. They will be constantly under attack from those who cannot
compete with them by just doing the same thing that Google does. As long as
Google does not attempt "total global domination" by overt use of
their monopoly they will be fine. However, there will always be the want-to-be
companies that will try to use Government to compete through accusations of
illegality in everything Google does. Because of the rule changes when a
company comes to domination of a market, the company has to learn how to act
different than as an up and coming company. Google seems to learn and these
pokes at it help.
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