Comment by wvenable
3 years ago
> 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.
The landscape has changed (or to pun... the netscape?).
We now have genuine browser competition. I think Safari and Firefox are just enough to say Chrome is not a monopoly. I write this on FF right now (running on Ubuntu) because it is a viable alternative.
This is the case for now, might be different in 2023.
"X is free" is not enough to be a problem on it's own.
> 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.