Monopoly in The Technology Market
One of the things that economists dislike are monopolies. I think it is safe to say that the public also dislikes them, because whenever we have contact with monopolies it is the consumer that suffers the most. This is often due to the fact that we have to pay a higher price, or simply the quality of goods and services are lower. When it comes to the technology market, it seems that Microsoft and Google are in many ways monopolists. What consequences does that have to an average Internet user? I believe that it does not benefit us, because there is not enough competition in the market. If this trend is going to continue, then soon there will be even less companies to compete with Microsoft or Google.
A prime example of the monopoly of Google is Pagerank. Pagerank has become very important for many webmasters in the blogosphere, and even if this is only the opinion of Google about your website, this does not change the fact that bloggers are still interested in it. This is because Google is a monopolist, and Internet users are starting to realize what the disadvantages are of a company being a monopolist. Fortunately, there are some counter measures being taken like the introduction of other ranking systems like RealRank, a ranking system that actually tracks the visitors to your site and ranks it accordingly. On the other hand, PR updates only once every few months, and it is very hard to know whether your PR will get higher or drop.
What I wanted to say in this post is that there are advantages of having more than just one or two companies that basically control the Internet, or in this particular case, control the only popular website ranking system.