All these companies obtained this market share by purchasing competitors or integrating surrounding businesses. You're right though, they're all problems and shouldn't have been allowed to acquire so casually to their current market positions.

That being said, Google gets primary access to your personal data and habits, and then also gets to sell advertising based on that data. That's certainly more unseemly than having too few choices for eyewear, don't you think?

"That being said, Google gets primary access to your personal data and habits, and then also gets to sell advertising based on that data." Then lets find legislation that enforces privacy, but still allows them to work with advertisers. The platform is here, but needs adjustment.

Well, you are still free to not use Google and deny them access to your data, there are alternatives to all of their services. With some of the other companies mentioned, this might be trickier...

> All these companies obtained this market share by purchasing competitors

And Google has acquired hundreds of companies in the last 20 years.

Ok, if you don't want to break them up, then can we at-least consider anti-trust charges?

US anti-trust litigation has degraded to the point of non-existence. Microsoft faced anti-trust charges in 1998 that will puzzle most youngsters in HN today - because both Google and Apple do far-far worse. Destroying all competition via control of the market has become normalised US corporate behaviour. Why has this been allowed to occur ?

For all its faults, the EU appears to notice this when the US doesn't.

You’re forgetting the monopoly situation Microsoft had for desktop computing in the late nineties. For better or worse, neither Google nor Apple has a monopoly in mobile, and Apple aren’t really attempting to leverage their natural monopoly in tablet computing (leaving aside the somewhat dubious WebKit requirement on iOS).

Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors.

Paypal? Absolutely.

Luxottica, Pearson, Aetna - no idea. Perhaps they're having similar discussions on eywear community messageboards and healthcare messageboards where they know about such things?

Or perhaps you can write a sensible, well-reasoned article using evidence on how these companies are similar to Facebook, Google or some other tech behmoth and what the appropriate remedies are or aren't? Just a thought.

Your argument doesn't take into account the absolute market size and influence. No one is churning out propaganda on the other companies you mentioned because those markets are either much smaller or much harder to manipulate than Google's market.

Why would people try to cancel Luxottica? Eyewear touches a much smaller market and doesn't have nearly the same potential to manipulate people as Google does (at least not yet). People will always focus all of their attention on the largest threat.

If the ball gets rolling with breaking up one of these companies and the rest follow, isn't that a good outcome? Arguing for all-or-nothing feels like letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.

For what it's worth I do think those ones should be broken up as well, no reason to confine our attention just to popular tech companies.

This is his 3rd article in a “series” on breaking up monopolies. In his first article, he summarizes a book and covers your examples:

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/06/08/Anti-mono...

His second article is about breaking AWS out of Amazon, into a fictional company called A-Cloud. And he’s using Amazon’s own project planning process to do so, though I can’t tell if it’s out of habit or for the mordant irony.

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2020/06/21/A-Cloud-P...

Aetna shouldn’t be broken up - it should be nationalised!

Large market share just doesn't mean much unless the market has non-trivial barriers to entry that make competition infeasible. And that's certainly the case wrt. the 'platform'-like businesses of Google and other large tech firms. They should simply be required to be interoperable with other players in the market, and a break-up is definitely one way of pursuing this.

I think you underestimate how many fans of strong anti-trust enforcement would actually be in favor of breaking up almost every one of those mega-companies that's been vacuuming up competitors through acquisitions for decades.

All the examples you mentioned probably have a negative impact on the market (and the public), the ones I'm familiar with definitely do.

I'm tired of there being reasons for the same hate Facebook, Zoom and Google narratives every single day.

> What about Luxottica? It has over 80% market share on eyewear brands.

I would assume optometrists and opthamologists argue about that on their own forums rather than this tech forum filled with people mostly from tech.

Because this is HackerNews and we are more affected by Google than those other companies.

I doubt this. Most people here employ ad blocking of some form, use Firefox and religiously de-google. At least this particular thread is probably 90% of those people.

If you work in the tech industry or have a web site, I'd say there's a good chance you are affected by Google.

exactly. I'm not saying that those companies are perfect, but writing opinion articles only against them it's becoming a bit too much.

You can also find it in many marketing strategies of some companies. Take duckduckgo for example, I love them more than google but I'm kinda tired of 'Use us, Because Google is BAD' approach