Mass surveillance of billions of people pays off handsomely.
Google and Facebook are the only two businesses that prosper on ads, while your local newspapers, specialized websites, and journalism in general are dying.
Google and Facebook are the only two businesses that prosper on ads, while your local newspapers, specialized websites, and journalism in general are dying.
> Please don't use Hacker News primarily for political or ideological battle. This destroys intellectual curiosity, so we ban accounts that do it.
If you poke through my comments, you'll find we share antipathy for Facebook and, to a less degree, Google. That antipathy, however, is an opinion. Not a fact. Neither Facebook nor Google are monopolies by any common definition.
Their business models disagree with our values. But a lot of Americans do as well. Your comments forego the debate necessary to establish agreement, and in that respect I think they are inflammatory. (As well as unproductive towards our common cause of convincing people these companies should be regarded with more caution.)
Put another way, monopoly companies have a large market share, but not all companies with a large market share are monopolies.
The FTC explains their view of what is a monopoly.
If google is not a monopsony they are certainly very close. This is reflected in the margins of online publishers vs those of google. If you want to publish content online, you have to do it on googles terms.
This degree of market power over the flow of information frankly makes me pretty uncomfortable.
Tracking Google Maps journeys, YouTube, Google Analytics across most of the web, a major portion of global email communications, Hangouts, Google Drive, etc, the list goes on and on.
Immensely valuable data that is able to predict trends and behaviour of both businesses and people in many instances