What's really puzzling is that Google Analytics never got banned because of antitrust laws. It's the most obvious example of predatory pricing I've ever seen. How is a smaller company supposed to compete against a free product?
If a competitor can't produce a quality product that people will pay for, consumers aren't being harmed by the prevalence of a free good-enough product.
In a consumer-protection world where a free and open source Linux had 98% market share in the OS market, Microsoft or Apple would have no leg to stand on to sue its developers over anti-trust. In a competitor-protection world, they would.
The US views anti-trust through a very consumer-focused lens[1], the EU sometimes views it through a more competitor-focused one.
[1] This doesn't mean I agree with it, and there are obvious problems with trying to prove harm in a court of law, if no alternative exists.
I think you’d have a very good case against Amazon, and probably Uber/Lyft, and I’ve long wondered why no one sued them over it. But in Google’s case, Analytics is profitable for the same reason Youtube is profitable—Google makes money off the data they gather.
If you can't beat the free offering, then go home.
- A French Ned Flanders, probably
In the real world of physical goods, there are laws against this. But Google's a tech company, so anything goes.
Which is exactly my point.
"[Dumping] occurs when manufacturers export a product... at a price below the normal price with an injuring effect. The objective of dumping is to increase market share in... by driving out competition and thereby create a monopoly situation"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
That's exactly what's happening here.
Google prices Analytics at $0 to prevent any competition from starting up.
While an argument can be made that Google doesn't need to charge money for the product because that cost is made up in other areas, there is no way of knowing that, because those costs are not public. We don't know if it's fully made up by other means, or partially made up by other means, or not at all.
Like you, IANAL, but it's my understanding that legally, it's not about the price, it's about the intent.
It's not dumping because, in the absence of any competition, the price hasn't changed. It just turns out the market price for this service is $0.
I think you can show Google has monopoly on search and search data and GA is the only analytics allowed to connect with that.
Is it dumping? Yes. They don’t intend to raise the price, but they get paid not in cash but in terms of increasing their monopoly by having so much data on us.
Now a lot of things are like this (anything where you give your email for a discount code). But they are not intended to get a global monopoly or make it impossible for anyone else to do business competing with you.
Now these days it would be ridiculous if your device or operating system didn't come with a browser.
> They get paid not in cash but in terms of increasing their monopoly by having so much data on us
Yes, and anyone else can do the same.
We now have genuine browser competition. I think Safari and Firefox are just enough to say Chrome is not a monopoly. I write this on FF right now (running on Ubuntu) because it is a viable alternative.
This is the case for now, might be different in 2023.
"X is free" is not enough to be a problem on it's own.
You can't come to this conclusion until you prevent Google from using the acquired data to improve their ad service.
In the U.S. most antitrust law is based on protecting what's best for the consumer, not protecting the competition from a free alternative.
The market should just create a better solution or find investors to call the bluff of the offending company and make even more money
But I don't think it's predatory. It clearly worked for cloudflare and seems to work for Tailscale (they openly said they're using the same strategy). It would be predatory if others couldn't match that, but I'd argue many competitors could offer free plans for small websites if they wanted to.