Smaller operators will have high marginal costs and higher prices, and will never be able to compete with bigger operations that can utilize software and other technology to offer the absolute lowest prices.
Although, in other businesses like retail, this results in single digit profit margins at best, whereas in software, due to the minimal labor needed and protections of copyright and obfuscation and network effects, the tech companies can maintain much bigger profit margins.
No other industry except perhaps finance has the potential to cheaply scale as IT. I wonder what antimonopoly actions have been in finance in the past (finance seems to have been a lot more regulated since forever)
Yes, a few years back they changed the points ratio on that end. It used to take about 500 points to get a $5 gift card and now it is 5250 points.
But they also fiddled with things on the other end.
At least for me. Maybe Bill Gates likes me or something and told his people "Make sure that pathetic homeless woman can earn $10 per month as my generous gift to her."
I earn a $5 gift card about once every two weeks-ish. I'm poor enough that matters to me, so it is something I am very aware of. That $5 gift card is sometimes still all the money I have for the day, though I'm less desperately poor than when I was homeless.
I don't know what else to tell you. Your info sounds out of date to me, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
I was just doing it passively on one computer without extensions.
The 'anti trust' in this situation would be Google using it's own dominance over Chrome and Android to 'unfairly' promote it's own products.
The most unhealthy thing in these systems is the 'value chain creep' that allows monopoly in one area, to be leveraged into other areas.
Imagine if you owned all the real estate in the state and you had a cracker factory. Hey, just charge your cracker-making competitors 2x the rent. Nobody can make crackers but you.
Or you own all the railways and charge your Oil pumping competitors more to transport Oil - you have an Oil monopoly.
Chrome is not a 'money losing product' - it's absolutely one of the most important products in Google's portfolio - the surpluses are yielded elsewhere, in Search. Arguably same for Android.
If there were an 'anti trust' case it would be to separate Search/Chrome/Android/Cloud in the similar vein that Microsoft would ostensibly be separated from any app software.
Amazon uses AWS surpluses to 'dump' on commercial distribution which is another weird one.
If there is a case to concern over monopoly, it's those.
There should be multiple rankers on top of the index, users should be able to choose and create new rankers. Same for filtering - what gets hidden/censured, put the power back to the users, let them select their filter lists. Instead of one true ranking and filtering, let users customise it as they like.
Or put another way, governments would chose to intervene by helping to create more 'competition' - which creates product variations approximating true market needs - as opposed to trying to 'legislate features'. 'Feature lists today' but something else tommorow. If the market is healthy, it will move in the direction of value, is the idea.
Governments can also help by promoting and supporting standards.
A famous example, Yahoo!, didn't walk away from search and partner with Microsoft because of the difficulty of building an index. They did it because it was going to cost billions per year to try to keep up with Google in producing results.
I'm not arguing there's no work to do in building an index, but the problems of crawling and indexing can be solved by cash. They're a moat against small challengers, but not against well capitalized ones. Ranking and filtering require lots of research and tuning. This is the moat against even the well capitalized.
Put another way: do you really disagree that Google would still easily dominate search based on result quality even if small startups got access to their index data?
>> That's an example of how competition is supposed to work. Phone makers sell their audience to the highest bidder.
> That's actually the opposite of how it's supposed to work. You're not supposed to be able to use your dominance in one market (cell phone manufacturing) to unfairly compete in another (search).
If you read the comment in question, there is no suggestion that the cell phone manufacturers are competing in the search market. They're taxing it, or selling to it.
So.... what are you trying to say?
Apple 25%, Samsung 34%, Huawei 17%, Xiaomi 10% in Europe
Sounds pretty fine for a market with healthy competition.
Really hard to call any of them a monopoly.
Google® has 94+% of mobile search in both US and EU!
Apple gets 11 billions/year to use Google as the default search engine
The remaining 61% (Samsung+Huawei+Xiaomi) is Android that means Google
Xiaomi defaults to Baidu in China, for example, but everywhere else, where the CPC has no direct control over the wires, they use Google because Google money is good even in China
That's an example of how competition is supposed to work. Phone makers sell their audience to the highest bidder. There's no shortage of phone makers. The issue is that google bought them all.