Over at Ars, Ryan Paul has an appropriately sharp-tongued response to the Mozilla Foundation’s troubling move to become a cheerleader for the European Commission’s ongoing antitrust efforts against Microsoft. Apparently Mozilla will assist the EC’s investigation “by offering expertise about the browser market.”
Paul focuses on what’s wrong with this in both a micro and macro sense. He rightly points out that the potential remedies here do not bode well for the future of this sector, since regulatory tinkering with high-tech product standards is bound to end badly and create a terrible precedent for future interventions. “It’s hard to find a rational argument in favor of mandatory standards enforcement,” Paul says. “It would be punitive and unhelpful to the advancement of the web.” Moreover, Paul notes that things have never looked better on the browser front:
Claims that Microsoft’s monopoly status has eliminated competition in the browser market sound hollow in the face of the profoundly vibrant browser market that exists today. The record-setting launch of Firefox 3 added up to over 8 million downloads in the first 24 hours alone. Firefox’s global market share continues to climb every month and the browser has grabbed almost 30 percent of the European market.
And let’s not forget about those two little companies called Google and Apple who have competing products in the field! They’re making serious inroads in the browser wars. Moreover, Microsoft is struggling to hold on to whatever “dominance” they have left in their core market: OS. As Paul concludes:
To the observant tech enthusiast, all signs seem to indicate that Microsoft’s monopoly is on its way out. The Redmond giant is in no danger of annihilation, but it’s definitely not positioned to dictate terms to the rest of the industry anymore.
But what is perhaps most shocking about Mozilla’s call for intervention is the way that Mozilla Foundation chairperson Mitchell Baker minimizes the importance of not just Firefox, but the entire open source movement, when justifying EC intervention in this marketplace.
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Those who criticize Google as a “monopoly” usually focus on the search and advertising markets. Google may indeed have a huge lead in those markets, but it is by no means a “monopoly” in the strict sense of the word as the only (“mono-“) seller in that market.
If the critics are concerned about about true “monopoly” or at least something close to it, perhaps they ought to focus on Feedburner, the free service Google acquired back in 2007. If one takes a very narrow definition of the service Feedburner offers, one could argue that there is no real alternative to Feedburner. But on the other hand:
I have a very simple solution. I use my own RSS feed I don’t need some other company providing a enhanced solution. I have never understood why people used feedburner at all.
Getting statistics from a feed is elementary. There are several services out their that provide podcast statistics.
Stupidity in giving someone else control over ones feed is something I will never get. I have no sympathy for those having feedburner issues.
Regardless, some leading bloggers have expressed outrage over Feedburner’s less-than-perfect reliability—see this recent rant by Michael Arrington. But we call in the federales to “fix” the “problem”—if one properly apply that term to a free service beloved by (nearly all) bloggers everywhere just because it’s not absolutely, positively 100% reliable or instantaneous or simply because some people don’t like the idea of using yet another Google product, no matter how good it is—let’s see what Feedsqueezer, a soon-to-be-launched service, will offer.
Note: The word “monopoly” is now commonly used to mean “control that makes possible the manipulation of prices.” It’s not obvious what that would mean in the case of those Google services, that are both free to the user and not directly related to any price paid by, say an advertiser—as distinct from, say, Adwords or Adsense, where there are at least prices that might, in theory, be controlled.
The NYT reports that Google has recently disclosed in an SEC filing that it had 1 million advertisers as of 2007. Some analysts suggest that Google’s growing scale will lead to higher ad prices:
Ben Schachter, an analyst with UBS, said he expects the current number is likely to be between 1.3 million and 1.5 million. Google declined to comment on the current size of its advertising base.
“It is a number that people have wanted to know for a long time,” Mr. Schachter said. More advertisers means more revenue — and more revenue, on average, for every search query — for a couple of reasons: a larger number of queries will have ads matched against them; and on popular queries, competition for placement will be more intense, and as a result, ad prices, which are set by auction, will be higher.
But is Google’s success really driving up ad prices? The same piece also notes that:
Interestingly, each advertiser, on average, spent a little more than $16,000 a year on Google. That figure changed little between 2003 and 2007.
As one of the commenters on the piece noted:
If average advertiser expenses hasn’t really changed in the last 5 years, maybe Google’s argument that it’s not a monopoly because prices are determined by ad auctions, not Google’s search share, holds some weight.
Meanwhile, Google Watch notes Microsoft’s recent success in signing up Verizon, Dell, Sun and Hewlett-Packard as partners for Microsoft’s Live Search engine and asks whether Google’s success is driving potential partners into Microsoft’s arms, as Microsoft appears to be working harder to gain market share for its own search and advertising products. So can Microsoft—and Yahoo!—regain momentum?
Perhaps 2009 will bring some answers to these questions—and more hard data about ad prices. But whatever happens, it’s a safe bet that speculation and fierce argument will abound with every new development in the search/advertising wars.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.