Despite a ton of well-funded competition,
The Washington Post's Steven Pearlstein asks if it's too
late to loosen Google's grip on the Web. "Google has already achieved a near-monopoly in Web search and search advertising, and has cleverly used that monopoly and the profits it generates to achieve
dominant positions in adjacent or complementary markets," he writes.
What's the solution to this perceived problem? Sure, the make pure capitalists cringe, Pearlstein suggests that the
government get involved. "Where I have a problem... is in allowing Google to buy its way into new markets and new technologies, particularly when the firms being bought already have a dominant
position in their respective market niches," he writes. Meanwhile, "The ease with which Google has been able to extend its dominance reflects, in large part, the inability to adapt century-old
antitrust laws to the quite-different economics of a high-tech economy that is susceptible to winner-take-all competition."
Read the whole story at Washington Post »