Erin Bishop
Article Summary #2
Economics 301
06/28/2016
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21635000-european-moves-against-google-are-a
bout-protecting-companies-not-consumers-should-digital
While this article may be from two years ago, the discussion of digital monopolies is far
from over. There have always been debates over the span of control that companies like
Facebook, Amazon and most importantly Google, have on the market. Chapters 8-11 cover
the discussion of different kinds of markets like perfect competition, monopolistic
competition and monopoly. While you would think with competitors like Bing and Yahoo,
the search engine market would be a monopolistic competition, Google is slowly become a
monopoly which was a concern for the European Parliament. “Google…has 68% of the
market of web searches in America and more than 90% in many European countries”. By
these numbers, it really does seem like Google; especially in Europe, really do control the
market place with no real competition in site.
In America is currently seems like it is a still a monopolistic competition, but with the
chance of a monopoly looming over. Google is known for being a better search engine.
With its superior branding, search engines like Yahoo and Bing really haven’t seemed like
a threat. However, what is still in debate is whether Google is abusing their domination of
the market. Since there are low barriers to entry in the digital world, and it is very easy to
build product popularity there is far more competition in the digital market then there is the
physical world.
There is also evidence that tech monopolists can crash at any time due to this competitive
