Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

I have another bone to pick with Slate, this time over an article by Farhad Manjoo, on whether the Justice Department should initiate anti-trust suits against Google (the short answer is no). I don’t disagree with Manjoo’s conclusion. There’s little evidence that Google is monopolistic. Yes, Google controls virtually all search on the Western internet, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that Google is being “anti-competitive”. As Manjoo points out, true monopolies get into trouble when they actively try to strangle the competition, and there’s no evidence to suggest that Google has done anything to stifle the progress of its would-be rivals. Google has attained dominance in search simply by being vastly faster, simpler, and better than its rivals.

Manjoo goes further, saying that even if Google were a monopoly guilty of anti-competitive practices (which it is not), it still wouldn’t be worth the Justice Department’s time. His case in point is Microsoft, whose anti-trust lawsuits were resolved years after they were relevant, to little real effect. The critical error in Manjoo’s case is this:

The theory behind the prosecution was that Microsoft’s mobster tactics would raise the price of software and slow down innovation. But that didn’t happen…Many of Microsoft’s assets turned out not to matter, because upstarts like Google and old foes like Apple found ways to innovate around them.

That’s not exactly true. In the mid-1990s, Microsoft was trying to own the internet. This wasn’t an insane prospect at the time, mind you. The majority of people going online did so through services like AOL and Compuserve, which provided walled-garden access to the internet, strictly administered and heavily filtered. Just as Microsoft had attained a monopoly on computers through Windows and on enterprise software through Office, it hoped to gain the same level of control over the internet through Internet Explorer. To make this happen Microsoft had to blur the line between Windows and the internet, to the point where users would equate one with the other. They steadily merged Internet Explorer with the operating system itself, creating many system hooks, easily exploited by hackers, that gave (and continue to give) Windows users no end of grief.

Had Microsoft not tried so hard to own the internet, Internet Explorer would never have become a massive security risk, Windows machines would never have become cesspools of viruses and malaware, and there never would have been a reason for a Microsoft customer to consider the competition. It’s certainly true that Google, Apple, and Firefox are more innovative companies that make better products than Microsoft, but they were able to establish footholds in their markets precisely because Microsoft was still behaving like a monopolistic gorilla, to its detriment.

Microsoft’s monopoly didn’t simply fade into irrelevance. In domains where Internet Explorer doesn’t cause too many problems, say, office productivity software, Microsoft still maintains absolute dominance with little or no real competition. In regards to the internet, Microsoft makes nothing but bad decisions. Google, on the other hand, always seems to make the right ones. They aren’t a monopoly now, but, contrary to Manjoo’s point, it would certainly be worth keeping an eye on them to make sure they don’t become one.