Is Google a monopoly?
Google “won its near-monopoly fair and square,” says Steven Pearlstein in The Washington Post, just like “AT&T in the 1950s, IBM in the 1960s, Intel in the 1970s, and Microsoft in the 1980s.” But does it stifle competition, as antitrust regulators charge? With its purchase of ad firm DoubleClick, “not particularly.” But with its proposed investment in Facebook, yes. AT&T, IBM, and the others were supplanted by innovation. And Facebook may well be the “new idea will come along to supplant Google as Internet kingpin.” The government needn’t punish dominant players like Google, but it should “make sure the monopolist doesn’t use its advantages to eliminate the emerging contenders.”
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