Does the Internet tend towards natural monoplies? Columbia Law professor Tim Wu makes a strong argument that it does in an Op-Ed
in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal. While there is plenty of diversity on the Internet and few barriers to setting up shop, he points out that category after category is dominated by a single firm: Google, Facebook, Amazon, Skype, Twitter, Apple, and eBay.
Wu writes:
The Internet has long been held up as a model for what the free market is supposed to look like—competition in its purest form. So why does it look increasingly like a Monopoly board? Most of the major sectors today are controlled by one dominant company or an oligopoly. Google “owns” search; Facebook, social networking; eBay rules auctions; Apple dominates online content delivery; Amazon, retail; and so on.
If you define a market narrowly enough, it is easy to make any company look like a monopoly. But let’s concede that the Internet creates a lot of winner-take-most, if not a winner-take-all, situations. (A company can effectively have monopoly power without technically owning 100 percent of the market). The bigger question is: How durable are information monopolies on the Internet?
The same factor that gives rise to these monopolies so fast can prove to be their undoing: the lack of friction. Switching costs are almost nonexistent for most products on the Internet. Every single competing product or service is literally just a click away.
If there is one thing that locks us in, it is ourselves. It is the network effects at play across the Internet which help build up these natural monopolies faster than they otherwise would. Wu makes a deliberate point of this:
It was we, collectively, who made Google and Facebook dominant. The biggest sites were faster, better and easier to use than their competitors, and the benefits only grew as more users signed on. But all of those individually rational decisions to sign on to the same sites yielded a result that no one desires in principle—a world with fewer options.
Every time we follow the leader for ostensibly good reasons, the consequence is a narrowing of our choices. This is an important principle of information economics: Market power is rarely seized so much as it is surrendered up, and that surrender is born less of a deliberate decision than of going with the flow.
The more people who use Google’s search, the better it becomes; the more people on Facebook, the more you need to be on it too; the more people who sell on eBay, the more buyers it attracts, and so on.
Certainly information monopolies do exist and can persist. Look at Microsoft’s everlasting hold on desktop operating systems. But the half-life of market domination seems to be dwindling. AT&T ruled for 70 years, Microsoft ruled for maybe 25, so far Google has ruled for 10. Will Facebook rule next, and of so, for how long?
Monopoly is a big, bad, evil word, but not all monopolies are bad. One of the main reasons monopolies were regulated in the first place was because of their pricing power, but today’s information monopolies provide many of their services for free. It’s hard to argue consumer harm when consumers either aren’t paying much or are paying very little. (Amazon, for instance, maintains its dominant position in ecommerce through low prices). Many information monopolies today are more interested in collecting our data than taking our money.
The stronger argument is that information monopolies discourage competition, and that ultimately will limit choice and innovation. Look at search. You’d have to be crazy (or Blekko
) to launch a search startup today and try to go up against Google.
But that brings us back to the durability issue. If Google’s power is transitory because it missed the boat on social, then does it really matter whether it holds near-monopoly power in search? While it is a good idea to remain vigilant against the rise of any information monopolies, the Internet will keep moving faster than the law or regulations can keep up.
Photo credit: Flickr/ Chris Smart
Website: google.com Location: Mountain View, California, United States Founded: September 7, 1998 IPO: August 19, 2004 Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including:… Learn More
Website: facebook.com Location: Palo Alto, California, United States Founded: February 1, 2004 Funding: $836M Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users.
Facebook was founded by… Learn More
Website: amazon.com Location: Seattle, Washington, United States Founded: 1994 Amazon.com Inc (AMZN) is a leading global Internet company and one of the most trafficked Internet retail destinations worldwide. Amazon directly sells, or acts as a platform for the sale of, a very broad range of products, including books, music,… Learn More
Information provided by CrunchBase
Sunday, November 14, 2010
How Durable Are Information Monopolies On The Internet?
via techcrunch.com
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment