re: Breaking: Justice Department preparing to file anti-trust suit against Google

Google needs busting up it's a mynical leftist clap-trap.

That said chrome is the best browser around but google news has turned tabloid since they changed formats.

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How is that legal? The government breaks you up and one of the companies just reabsorbs a bunch of the other companies?

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That's fine for a company to grow, until they become a monopoly.

optics before election but good optics

It’s going to be very difficult to make something happen here, but hopefully the courts will recognize the power of big tech and reverse a previous, misguided precedent.



What makes antitrust action against the googles and facebooks of the world so difficult is a ruling from I believe the 70s that says that a monopolist is only acting as a monopoly if they use their market power to raise prices above what would otherwise be a market level. And this is the way that the econ 101 version of monopoly is always taught, right. We see how a monopolist with market power can raise their prices above a perfectly competitive level, thereby creating a deadweight loss and a drain on society.

So the court system takes this introductory model and concludes that if a monopolist is not raising their prices above the perfectly competitive level, then it’s not creating a deadweight loss, and therefore it’s not a drain on consumers or the economy. Problematic, but ok enough logic for a 1970s manufacturing economy.

Problem is, today we are no longer in that economy. We’re in the data economy. And in the data economy, google can give away their product for “free”. And because their product is “free”, they aren’t exercising undue monopoly power in the historical perspective of disproportionately raising prices.

This is going to be the ruling that the court system is going to have to just flat out ignore if we are going to see any change. Clearly google is acting as a monopolist in their anti-competitive practices as they routinely exercise their market power to crush new up and coming companies every single day. That’s flat out terrible for innovation and for our markets. But it’s also not a form of a direct pricing monopoly, so the precedents in the court system will unfortunately be going against the government in this case. Meaning they’ll need to make a damn strong, extensively detailed argument of all of the other ways that google is stifling competition for the courts to overturn our currently legally accepted definition of an illegal monopoly.

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Well, I just paid them for my cell phone, cable, and internet. They've also got their name on The Deathstar/Jerryworld, so I'm assuming that the government didn't exactly break them.

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You need to come back into this thread to say you don’t know what the hell you are talking about