Re:How We Value the Super-Rich - Wall Street vs. Silicon Valley
by neilk on Monday September 29, 2008 @03:20AM
(#318182)
The whole Internet economy is small enough to fail. It's still just a tiny sliver of the US economy. And ready substitutes for Google's wares exist all over the place; not as good in some cases, but more than adequate.
Besides, Google is mostly a facilitator of transactions. The might get fractions of a penny from every dollar spent on the interwebs. So if that price is fair, presumably we would just have to pay a few micro-pennies more per item for distributors to find alternative ways to market their goods or spend a few micro-pennies more effort in searching for it ourselves.
That seems wrong to me somehow, as it can be very hard to find some things on engines other than Google. But it seems to make economic sense. Unless we consider the very low "cut" that Google is taking to be an anti-competitive measure?
Besides, Google is mostly a facilitator of transactions. The might get fractions of a penny from every dollar spent on the interwebs. So if that price is fair, presumably we would just have to pay a few micro-pennies more per item for distributors to find alternative ways to market their goods or spend a few micro-pennies more effort in searching for it ourselves.
That seems wrong to me somehow, as it can be very hard to find some things on engines other than Google. But it seems to make economic sense. Unless we consider the very low "cut" that Google is taking to be an anti-competitive measure?