Are Facebook and Google the New Monopolies?: QuickTake Q&A
Facebook's Global Community Grows to Two Billion People
The rise of global technology superstars like Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google are creating new challenges for competition watchdogs. Along with Microsoft Corp., they are the five most valuable companies in the U.S. today, a ranking that only included Microsoft 10 years ago. They dominate their markets, from e-books and smart phones to search advertising and social-media traffic on mobile devices. This is fueling a global debate over whether it’s time to rein in such winner-take-all companies. While the U.S. has been largely hands off, the European Union’s recent $2.7 billion fine against Alphabet Inc.’s Google for favoring its shopping-comparison service over rivals’ -- and the promise of more such actions to come -- is cheering those who see pernicious effects from rising concentration. Some officials are even considering novel theories of antitrust, such as privacy issues.
No doubt they’re powerful. Google’s share of U.S. internet search advertising spending is about 78 percent, according to eMarketer. Google and Facebook Inc. together control about 56 percent of the U.S. mobile ad market. Apple Inc. takes more than 60 percent of high-end smartphone sales globally. About 30 percent of all U.S. e-commerce sales go through Amazon.com Inc. But under modern antitrust enforcement, those percentages alone aren’t enough to alarm regulators in the U.S., which long ago stopped equating big with bad.