When a tech company has such a huge market share that it becomes the market itself, it’s a tech monopoly.
Normally this is not legal. However in emerging digital spaces it happens, because laws lag behind in defining a space itself, so anti-monopoly laws can’t start working properly.
- Google is a tech monopoly because we haven’t properly defined the search space.
- Facebook is a tech monopoly because we haven’t properly defined the social networking space.
- Amazon is a tech monopoly because we haven’t properly defined the e-commerce space.
- Paypal is a tech monopoly because we haven’t properly defined the online payments space.
If we don’t define a space and a company takes most of it over, then we get twisted incentives and this company turns evil by systemic laws, even if most of the actual people working there are top professionals with great ethics.
As I have 10+ years of first-hand experience with Google and Paypal we’ll talk about tech monopolies in general but give examples mostly with these two so I can be sure they are 100% accurate.
To be continued…