Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook, the companies with extreme power to rule the world, even if they are four different types of businesses they have the same attitude towards its competitors. At the US congress hearing, conducted at JULY 29th, the CEO's of all these companies attended and tried to explain their side of the story. Anti-Trust subcommittee came with lot of documents, that just shows all these companies trying to destroy the competitors through their monopoly power.
There were stories about a lot of independent business that just vanished by these extreme powers. It includes activities like predatory pricing, copycat behaviours and other activities to kill competition just by using market domination. A good market is always the one with a different type of competing companies, if these companies start to exploit their monopoly power like this, there will not a thing as "choice" in our upcoming future, just living under their policies.
Apple
Tim Cook tried to reply everything in usual Apple style, dwelling on privacy, security and quality. Whatever they do, they just try to explain all that by
"We are doing it for privacy".
The main accusation against apple was about the way they treat the developers. Lot developers shared their bad experiences while working for Apple. The developer doesn't have much voice in the policies Apple creates for the App Store. Developers can either play by Apple's rules or leave the platform. There are things like forcing developers to use Apple's payment system for selling their works. There is also information that Apple discriminates developers like big and small.
This was another main accusation against Apple, they remove similar apps from the App store when they create their own version of it. It becomes controversial in the case of Parental Control Apps. It happened when Apple released its own parental control App Screen Time, and then they removed every other from App Store. It's an extreme example of exploiting their monopoly power to prevent competition.
A similar scenario happened when they released their own ebook store called iBooks, they forced each small and big publisher to join the iBooks app, who had their own ebook app. Random House Publication tried to resist this move and stay away from the deal. Again Apple used their unquestionable power in removing their application initially. Finally, they took the deal and joined iBooks.
Amazon
In the case of Amazon, the victims were small scale sellers and other small online stores. Amazon just runs the whole industry, there are only a few other establishments with small market shares, which is nothing in front of Amazon.
In the case of sellers, the things that happened was as same as that in the case Apple Developers. Amazon tries to find effective market with the data they have and starts producing their own products and preferring that mainly in their market place. They have enough power to recommend the consumers what they want to sell, the more profitable ones. A lot of small sellers income turned to zero in a day. Amazon captures a market easily by predatory pricing. The sellers have no other option left, they either can stay or leave.
This predatory pricing strategy is also the weapon amazon uses against its competitors concentrating on a specific market. It's also what happened with diapers.com.
They just make the offer no one can ever refuse, these small businesses guys can either do the hard battle with the giant or surrender in the first place. In future, there will be no independent businesses, all of them are gonna be under any of these four.
The complete surveillance over the world's web traffic, this single corporation owns the biggest discovery of our era named "internet".They know the taste and preferences of all of us, as the CEO Sundar Pichai mentioned, it's enough to build the products that everyone needs. He mentioned it as the right products and services. The question here is "Are they providing the right products and services?" or "Are they just showing us the ones which are more profitable for them?"
A research shows that 63% of web searches that are made on google ends us google's own website. It's enough to deal with the competitors and just put them away from the whole internet. The accusation was like showing search results that are the most profitable business for google on top and everyone else is put far away.
Google trying to prefer their favourites even when the right keywords also used. Yelp complained about google stealing their reviews and preferring another business's in favour of Google.
These are just a few discoveries that came into the public, A corporation with all kind of data of the people around the world and complete control over the internet could do anything. Some people's replies were like to run away from the internet and do something where Google cant intervene. By the way, it's impossible.
There is no new technology that Facebook didn't try to clone or buy. They defeated most of their competitors just by buying them or adding that features to their world. It's also happened with Instagram, Facebook saw Instagram as a threat from the beginning. The emails between Zuckerberg and his financial officer David Ebersman shows a clear picture of how they dealt with competitors.
It clearly shows anti-competitive acquisition, using the market share power to threat the independent business firms, In the case of Facebook, they were even not ready to compete. All they wanted was just acquire the competitor and become the extreme power.
Copycat behaviours of Facebook was also questioned, especially there was the controversial subject of Facebook trying to copy the features of Snapchat. Facebook also even tried to buy Snapchat, but they are the only ones that got away. Social Media startups are facing lot of struggles because of Facebook's anti-competitive attitude.
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All these four are just trying to increase their territories, in that run lot of small independent firms are fading away even before they could realise. As the committee said, what we need is more and more establishments like amazon, which brings competition to the market and provides the customers with the best products. We don't want to be stuck inside limited choices a monopolistic firm provides, more and more passionate people with innovative ideas need to come forward.
I would like to hear about your thoughts on, this day by day enlarging monopoly.