Now there are national and regional winners. However, in some countries/regions, the market is indeed large enough to maintain more than one network-for example, the United States has Lyft and Uber.
Now, a generation has passed since the antitrust case against Microsoft, and two generations have passed since the split of AT&T, we are now talking about Google, Apple, Facebook or Amazon again. Seriously, there is almost no discussion about splitting Apple, perhaps because Apple is clearly a single business. There are some voices to split AWS and Amazon-but I think it is basically not convincing (I will talk about it again in a future article), but no matter what, Amazon’s retail business itself is still a super powerful company. Generate a steady stream of cash flow. But there are many discussions about separating Google and Facebook. In this regard, I think the comparison with Standard Oil, AT&T and Microsoft is the most interesting. On the one hand, they have obvious detachable parts (Youtube, Instagram, etc.), but for Apple and Amazon, this situation is not so obvious. But on the other hand, I think that, as in the case of Office and Windows, their competitive advantages are not because the same companies can leverage each other, but come from network effects< /strong>. Therefore, splitting it may have little effect.
As the first observation, Google and Facebook have a bilateral business model: They are for advertisers and consumers. There is no doubt that these two have market advantages in online advertising (especially if you define Google’s relevant market as search advertising and Facebook’s relevant market as social advertising). Similarly, when doing business with advertisers, there is no problem with bundling and using each other’s different assets. If it is split, advertisers will have greater influence, while the influence and market power of the companies after Google and Facebook will be split will become smaller.
(Ironically, under all conditions being equal, advertisers have greater influence on search or social networking companies, which means that consumers’ privacy will become smaller, which is often not antitrust The advocates argue that, in fact, privacy is not necessarily a direct competition issue-but indeed, the policy is to weigh the trade-offs).
However, even though advertisers can now make Facebook compete with Instagram and Google compete with Youtube (own order), consumers’ new choices are still the same as in the past. It is like splitting AT&T and liberalizing the telecom equipment market, but not the natural monopoly of the local telephone market.