Re:Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust laws...
by papeda on Friday May 15, 2020 @09:04PM
(#23199440)
Hm. If I understand the cellophane paradox, it says that the "substitutes exist" does not imply "there is no monopoly".
That seems different from your argument, which I understand to be "only a monopolist would make it easy for consumers to choose a competitor". But again, the conclusion that Google is a monopolist seems to be baked into this logic -- would you really say Google is not a monopolist if they did not offer search engine choice?
Re:Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust laws...
by Dylan16807 on Saturday May 16, 2020 @10:23AM
(#23203594)
> which I understand to be "only a monopolist would make it easy for consumers to choose a competitor"
No, not "only".
The argument is that while non-monopolists have a motivation to add those choices, monopolists have a motivation too.
Therefore seeing the end result isn't very strong evidence for whether something is a monopoly or not.
Re:Justice Department, states likely to bring antitrust laws...
by papeda on Saturday May 16, 2020 @11:10AM
(#23204000)
I agree with your statement. The comment I was responding to does not:
> If anything this is evidence of Google’s search engine monopoly and Google built the selection feature into Chrome it in furtherance of that monopoly power
Kind of like the cellophane paradox[1] I suppose. From Wikipedia:
> As Richard Posner wrote, "Reasonable interchangeability at the current price but not at a competitive price level, far from demonstrating the absence of monopoly power, might well be a symptom of that power; this elementary point was completely overlooked by the court"
But instead of a price denominated in dollars it's in consumer data I suppose.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellophane_paradox