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Comment by danblick | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad you're questioning that assertion, but I don't think your counter-argument is very convincing. The economics of the printing press were different than the economics facing Google. For example: Google search benefits from network effects (clicks are used to improve future search results). Google mostly provides information goods (zero marginal cost of production), but books aren't really a perfect information good.

Google is darn near close to a monopoly on search (at least, Peter Thiel made that the premise of Zero to One), which isn't to say they're also a monopolist in every other field they're in.

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They're a semi-monopoly (~80%) in the following markets: mail, search, online advertisements, browser, smartphones, mapping, layer data (it's $AMOUNT busy at place X right now)

I like Google since they're one of the few companies that has a 20+ year record of being careful with user data, but how much they control (or at least facilitate) is pretty scary from an objective viewpoint.

I don't know what your definition of "perfect information good" really is, but books have been converting information into knowledge for hundreds of years. Before the printing press, scribes used to hand-duplicate. The invention of printing press effectively changed the whole scene (just as the searching on the Internet changed Internet). Irrespective of the concerns of privacy etc, Google provides the best sauce of technology which facilitates searching the information (which converts to knowledge). As far as I can see, Google isn't in the business of creating knowledge.

The term "information good" is from economics: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_good

An information good is one for which it's very cheap to produce additional units. Unfortunately, I'm probably abusing the term, since books are listed as an example of information goods. The idea is that most of the cost of producing the book goes into the content (writing, editing, etc.) and actually printing one additional book is cheap. (When I said books are "imperfect" information goods I meant that they still require paper and shipping and retailing and such, but it's probably just a bad use of the term.)

There's a fantastic book about the economics of information goods called "Information Rules" ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/087584863X ). Software is an information good so this covers some topics relevant to the digital economy. My favorite part is the chapter on lock-in. In particular the discussion around the equation:

profits from a customer = quality advantage + switching costs

which puts "(marginal) goodness of your product" on equal footing with "pain you can inflict on your customer for leaving".

The original topic was not on the topic of economics, rather, the monopolies any invention creates. The economics of things have existed alongside everything else in human history. The point was whether Google is a monopoly in the context of information. My contention was to identify the fact that Google only facilitates the information (like what printing press did to the information people were keeping orally, or through scribes).

If Google is the monopoly in the sense that the OP describes, then a unified Internet itself is a bigger monopoly. Break apart the monolith of the Internet itself, and you have more player contending equally in facilitating search etc.

If you're not aware, one of the authors of Information Rules (great book, BTW, I second the recommendation), Hal Varian, now works for Google as their Chief Economist.

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