During my studies, it was clear that companies that basically took over a whole market of products were considered a monopoly. In the United States, it has been a law against companies becoming monopolies since the early 1900s.
However, does that also include companies that conduct business online, and more so… how far can the old Sherman Anti-Trust Act extend?
Yahoo!, Google, and now Facebook are all big kahunas in acquiring smaller internet companies.
Yahoo! has been known to acquire companies and eventually burn them to the ground – like GeoCities. Google just likes to buy and play their name in front of the product, like Google Feedburner. Facebook… well… they just like to buy and shut out competition. Facebook bought FriendFeed and recently it acquired NextStop. Facebook is looking to have its own version of FourSquare.
Sorry, but even though I am not as active on FourSquare… why in the heck would I use Facebook to check in anywhere considering they do not have the best privacy for users?
Facebook is the #2 site online in Alexa and and is one of the most powerful tools for social media marketing. However… are all these acquisitions profitable ventures for Facebook? Or will they crash and burn like some of the programs both Yahoo! and Google have let die in the past 15 years?
What do you think?
Yup no doubt about it the movers and the shakers are prone to bowling over their competition every chance they get. But what are we as bloggers suppose to do? Boycott the biggest social media sites and search engines?
Sadly that won't help us in any way and probably wouldn't even get their attention.
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This is one of those posts I consider my "soapbox" routine. Should read my Yahoo! posts in the pasts. I got pretty pissed off. I know it is not my company, but why get rid of something that was actually being used by people and highly praised – like GeoCities?
Will look into guest posting. I have quite a list of places I need to guest post at. You are also welcomed to sign up and guest post here as well.
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Ranting can be theraputic. LOL
Would love to have you guest post and I will definitely guest post here. We gals gotta stick together! 😉
Oh I don't know a thing about the business practices of these companies. I do feel that if I had a company in a fast-changing environment, I'd want to acquire up and coming properties in order to better my company's chances of survival. At one point, what was doing well for Yahoo! were things like delicious, mybloglog, flickr.
But again, I don't know much, especially not about this stuff.
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Your title has it right: they are monopolies and they aren't really separate entities – they are all part of what I call "The Borg". They provide the illusion of competition when they are really controlled by the same few plutocrats who control the money supply of the world.
Those who have eyes to see would do well to move toward identifying and using independent solutions of all kinds that do not rely on any of the multi-national corporations.
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Facebook could be the new Google if they handle it right. FourSquare will struggle as soon as FB (and perhaps Twitter) add their localization services.
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