“I want to be a subscriber to a social network like Facebook, which has more
people,” says Nicholas Economides, a professor of economics at the NYU Stern
School of Business. “Big size is rewarded. If some company manages to really
[gain] big, big market share, like Facebook, or Google in its own area, then it
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abilities to control the market.”
At this point, Facebook had so much of the market that third parties such as
news sites couldn’t very well uninstall their Like buttons—they needed them to
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BIG TECH’S VERSION OF MONOPOLIES
Now that we’re talking about monopolies, it’s time to bring in Microsoft. In
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even more valuable than the operating systems it already installed on
everybody’s computers, Microsoft bundled the Internet Explorer browser into
its Windows OS, thus making sure that every computer came with a ready-to-go
default browser — Microsoft’s own.
The Department of Justice sued Microsoft, and after a long trial and lots of
testimony, a judge ruled that Microsoft be broken up into one part that runs the
Windows operating system and another part that does everything else. An
appeals court later reduced the penalty, but weakening Microsoft paved the way
for a period of technological innovation that gave us Google, Facebook,
Amazon, and a renewed Apple. Many economists say that this was the last
major antitrust action.
Photo^ credit:^ VolodymyrGoinyk/shutterstock.com