Every business sector tends towards monopoly
That isn't true.
Dominant companies (often not monopolies) arise, but they also decay. A good example is Standard oil, which steadily lost market share long before the government broke it up, and only retained any degree of market dominance at all by nearly constantly reducing its prices. When it did try to take advantage of its monopoly (at least past the very early days) it just took a hit to market share.
Microsoft has a monopoly on the desktop without any input from the government
Microsoft had a monopoly on Windows operating systems (a narrowly defined market) because the government granted them that monopoly. Copyright might be a good idea overall but its still a government granted monopoly.
Microsoft did not have a monopoly on the desktop, and their degree of dominance on the desktop, and to a greater decree in consumer computing in general, has declined largely for factors that had little to do with the government.
Google has a de facto monopoly on search to the point that Bing uses Google to supplement its searches.
It has dominance on search, but no monopoly. There are other search engines, personally I rarely use Google's web search (unless you count Startpage which shows Google results)
Microsoft may sometimes copy Google's results (that's disputed) Startpage definitely does, but they don't pass information on to Google or show Google's adds. Its not an example of Google being able to take advantage of any market dominance.
Even if Bing copies some of Google's results it shows a lot of its own. Startpage does pay Google, so if you don't want to even do business indirectly with Google you might not want to use them but there are plenty of other alternatives. You also have Yahoo (uses Bing results and gives 12% of the search revenue to MS), AOL Search, Ixquix, Duck Duck Go, ask.com, Dogpile, Gigablast, Blingo, Yandex (Russian but also does English search), and others; also various meta-search, specialized search, and non-English search engines. Anyone at any time (except people in places they are blocked who don't know how to get around the blocks) can use any of these search engines. Its not like physical stores where a dominant market presence might keep competitors off the shelves.
IE uses Bing as the default search,
The US and world economies is becoming more and more dominated by monopolies.
Except in areas were government grants or protects monopolies this is mostly not the case. Your link doesn't even make any argument for that idea. It shows percentages controlled by the largest 4 companies (4 companies controlling 15 to 75 percent does not equal a monopoly). Also it doesn't consider that in many of those 4 industries the top 4 companies have changed. (Some changed during the period of 1992 to 2007 that it covers, all of the top fours for each of the industries it lists have changed in my lifetime.) |
