Here’s the trajectory of a successful tech company.
- Idea
- Growth
- More growth
- Government feels that growth harms competitors
- Government accuses company of anti-competitive behavior

This happened to IBM, MSFT and GOOG. So, we should expect the same to happen to Facebook ;)

I’ve found your stuff on Zeynep Tufecki useful https://twitter.com/#!/techsoc. A friend and colleague at SJC Carleton U, Josh Greenberg, had also recommended her a few days before. https://twitter.com/#!/josh_greenberg.

When two people you know point someone out in rapid succession its always good to have a look and see. Anyway, she is interesting and I’m curious to see how the Keller/Tufecki conflab plays out.

Your article raises some great questions and I really like the concept of ‘search neutrality’. I hadn’t heard that before, but grasp immediately what it means, I think (rings bells with Tim Wu’s Master Switch for me).

I have several questions (some arguments dressed up as questions) about your take on Google and anti-trust, though. I hope you don’t mind me posting them here.

First, Google accounts for 2/3rds of the search and ‘related online advertising markets’ in the US. Everywhere else except Russia, China, Taiwan, Korea, Google’s share of search is 80 percent plus (Canada), high 80ies (Latin America) and, at upper reaches, 93 percent (Aus.). That’s a lot.

The FTC investigation will look at both the US and the global levels and, if nothing else, we could learn a lot.

I agree with the first part of your proposition part way through the story — i.e. “The theory is that Google is so powerful” that it can have a strong “impact on how people interact with the web”. I think that’s true, but just how, I don’t really much know. Zeynep, again, is a good person to help us think about this.

The second part of that sentence, however, obscures the significance of ‘subtle influences’ by pointing to a hammer: one of the primary harms could be that Google shows people “specific results and/or sending them to its own related properties”.

Not even Danny Sullivan, as you observe, argues that. We have to cast our net more subtly though, I think, to reflect how the design/configuration of online spaces affect how we conduct our lives online, as Tufecki and those she draws on (Hampton, Baym).

Google is a maximalist at many things (data gathering, sense making, distribution, collection, retention, etc.), and this cuts both ways in terms of making the web/dig media more ‘navigable’ (van Couvering) but also more central, invasive and often ‘gateway’ like. Gates are good, but often come with gatekeepers.

The argument by people like Crandall and Jackson that you cite favourably elsewhere is a particular species of economic argument, as you know. It is Schumpeterian in origins. Schumpeter saw consolidation as ‘episodic’ and swiped away just as often, after time, by the creative destruction/techno-economic innovation.

There’s some truth obviously in this, but two parts are problematic, me thinks. The processes of consolidation can also be seen as continuous (vs episodic). Eli Noam says that digitization actually magnifies such tendencies. Concentration at ‘digital hubs’ and ‘switching points’ is common, hence the intuitive appeal of ‘search neutrality’ (love the concept).

The Internet is not immune to such processes at significant points — search, browsers, legit online music, video players, etc.. So, that Google is coming under pressure is not unusual. Another reason we want to be skeptical of ‘bigness’ just for the sake of it is because it is easier to regulated. Every liberal and conservative knows this, and I think it is an idea that we must be aware of with respect to any entity that has the scale and market power that Google has.

Finally, I thought it was a bit of a stretch to say that Microsoft teaches us the lesson that well-meaning anti-trust regulation often strangles ‘big business’, the corporate goose that less us golden eggs — or so the fairy tale goes.

Another way of reading that is that government intervention backstopped the principle of ‘open media spaces’. It stood behind the principle that keeping ‘layers’ in the ‘network media system’ — networks, applications, content, devices — separate was a good idea. So do I, and we have all benefitted from it. We should recall that it was the original guru of ‘the future of cyberspace’ Lawrence Lessig that played special maestro to, if my memory serves me correctly, Judge Greene’s court. And Judge Greene himself was no slouch but had overseen the break-up and divestiture of ATT and the operations of the 7 RBOCs thereafter. Tim Wu (Master Switch) convincingly makes much the same argument today.

An old historian, R. L. Thompson, in his classic 1947 “Wiring a Continent” said that the telegraph had passed through three phases: methodless enthusiasm, strategic rivalry/ruinous competition, consolidation. I think that lesson applies to all media, Google and the Internet, are not exceptions.

I see similar presumptions in the writing of, for example, Peter Nowak, who seems that somehow CRTC bungling got us UBB rather than the telecom-media-Internet congloms that put it into place in the first place. To my way of thinking, this is akin to the ‘government is congenitally incapable’ view.

It was also the view of Schumpeter, who believed the notions of democracy were fairy tales and the best government could do would be to be run by experts who stayed out of the way.

I should get going now. Late. Anyway, hope those questions, ideas, arguments, etc. were/are interesting/enjoyable. cheers. D.