{"id":40173,"date":"2017-09-15T05:00:13","date_gmt":"2017-09-15T09:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=40173"},"modified":"2017-09-14T14:06:02","modified_gmt":"2017-09-14T18:06:02","slug":"will-googles-quasi-monopoly-last-as-long-as-aols-did","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/09\/15\/will-googles-quasi-monopoly-last-as-long-as-aols-did\/","title":{"rendered":"Will Google’s quasi-monopoly last as long as AOL’s did?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the big picture, I’m concerned with Google’s current market power and their ability to quash online freedom of speech almost at will (if not directly, through pressure on other companies to co-operate, or else: “Nice little business you\u2019ve got here, Mr. Forbes. It\u2019d be a shame if something happened to its Google search results\u2026”<\/a>). Google is huge and has fingers in an unimaginable number of pies, but it is still subject to market forces, as was an earlier behemoth of the online world<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The film [You’ve Got Mail<\/em>] was released in 1998. Amazon was founded in 1994 and had its IPO in 1997. It was about to crush big discount bookstores \u2014 does anyone still remember the other big chain, Borders? \u2014 and nobody had a clue<\/em>. There isn\u2019t a single mention in the film of Amazon or online sales.<\/p>\n

But the Internet is mentioned. It\u2019s right there in the title of the movie. You\u2019ve Got Mail<\/em>, for those who are old enough to remember, was a tagline for America Online, the largest Internet service provider in the dial-up era of the 1990s. For millennials, let me explain: we had to connect our computers to a phone line, and an internal modem would place a phone call to a local data center from which it could download information at impossibly slow speeds. […]<\/p>\n

AOL is there in the film\u2019s title, because that\u2019s how our protagonists are communicating: by trading e-mails on their dial-up AOL connections.<\/p>\n

AOL\u2019s high point was its merger with Time Warner in 2000. It was all downhill, rapidly, from there. Dial-up was quickly surpassed by broadband, and as the Web developed, nobody needed a \u201cWeb portal\u201d any more. Again, for younger readers, let me explain. When you managed to get to this exciting new thing called the World Wide Web, how did you know what sites to go to or how to access information? Before the Google search, before Facebook, before Twitter, you went to a Web portal, a launching off point that gathered links and directed you to various sources for news, entertainment, shopping, etc. These Web portals had a huge amount of influence \u2014 until they didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Now here\u2019s the fun part. At the same time nobody was paying much attention to Amazon because Barnes and Noble was going to crush all competitors and control the book business, there was widespread panic about the unstoppable monopoly power of AOL.<\/p>\n

AOL was going to gain a monopoly because of its death grip on instant messaging. The \u201ccomputer editor\u201d for The Guardian<\/em> worried that this was putting AOL \u201con its way to world domination.\u201d The AOL-Time Warner deal raised \u201cconcerns that its merger would create a media powerhouse that would level competitors, dominate the Internet, and control consumer choice.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Wired<\/em> podcast talked about fears of a Sun-AOL monopoly, but they didn\u2019t call that sort of thing a \u201cpodcast\u201d yet because the iPod hadn\u2019t been invented. The audio clip was an MP3 file, and they suggested you listen to it on a Sonique MP3 player from Lycos. The Sonique stopped being produced about a year later. Lycos was a major Web portal, and according to Wikipedia<\/em>, it was \u201cthe most visited online destination in the world in 1999.\u201d It was bought by a multinational conglomerate for $12.5 billion at the peak of the dot-com bubble.<\/p>\n

Whatever is left of Lycos was last sold for $36 million in 2010, though that deal seems to have collapsed in acrimony later on. Sic transit gloria mundi<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the big picture, I’m concerned with Google’s current market power and their ability to quash online freedom of speech almost at will (if not directly, through pressure on other companies to co-operate, or else: “Nice little business you\u2019ve got here, Mr. Forbes. It\u2019d be a shame if something happened to its Google search results\u2026”). […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[831,10,53,15,13],"tags":[328,58,469],"class_list":["post-40173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-liberty","category-politics","category-technology","category-usa","tag-google","tag-internet","tag-monopolies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-arX","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40173"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40173\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40174,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40173\/revisions\/40174"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}