Comment by reaperducer
3 years ago
It's not illegal to give things away for free unless it's dumping.
Which is exactly my point.
"[Dumping] occurs when manufacturers export a product... at a price below the normal price with an injuring effect. The objective of dumping is to increase market share in... by driving out competition and thereby create a monopoly situation"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dumping_(pricing_policy)
That's exactly what's happening here.
Google prices Analytics at $0 to prevent any competition from starting up.
While an argument can be made that Google doesn't need to charge money for the product because that cost is made up in other areas, there is no way of knowing that, because those costs are not public. We don't know if it's fully made up by other means, or partially made up by other means, or not at all.
Like you, IANAL, but it's my understanding that legally, it's not about the price, it's about the intent.
> Google prices Analytics at $0 to prevent any competition from starting up.
It's not dumping because, in the absence of any competition, the price hasn't changed. It just turns out the market price for this service is $0.
I would say it has more in common with the Microsoft antitrust case. In that they gave IE away for free.
I think you can show Google has monopoly on search and search data and GA is the only analytics allowed to connect with that.
Is it dumping? Yes. They don’t intend to raise the price, but they get paid not in cash but in terms of increasing their monopoly by having so much data on us.
Now a lot of things are like this (anything where you give your email for a discount code). But they are not intended to get a global monopoly or make it impossible for anyone else to do business competing with you.
IE is no more but the price for browsers is still free. Most consumers even at the time also did not pay for their browser.
Now these days it would be ridiculous if your device or operating system didn't come with a browser.
> They get paid not in cash but in terms of increasing their monopoly by having so much data on us
Yes, and anyone else can do the same.
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> It just turns out the market price for this service is $0
You can't come to this conclusion until you prevent Google from using the acquired data to improve their ad service.