There’s a paradox I heard of that’s pretty relevant in this line of thought that is pretty transportable to most things. I heard it in the context of IT security.
It goes something like this: you buy security and after 2 or 3 years when you need to renew, nothing bad has happened, so it seems like you don’t need security. When in actual fact the extra security has been the reason there haven’t been any incidents.
So it’s almost impossible to prove that buying the security is helping without extensive analytics.
In many cases those analytics are either very difficult or impossible to get.
To demonstrate the transportable nature of this concept, let’s transpose it to vaccines.
If everyone is vaccinated, then nobody gets sick from those diseases, making it seem like the diseases are not a threat anymore, which means that vaccines are no longer useful.
Meanwhile, in all actual fact, the only reason why polio is so rare is because there is a safe and effective vaccine for it that everyone has taken (replace polio with whatever disease you want that has an effective vaccine).
It’s a paradox of: how do we prove this is working, without discontinuing it and possibly being eaten by rats/leopards/whatever.
If there’s only monopolies in the market then is their product the best on the market, or is everyone using it because there’s no alternatives?
Leaning that monopoly argument against capitalism, it’s almost certainly not the best product. When you have a captive audience, those that need your service and don’t have an alternative, there’s no incentive to innovate, or invest in improving the product at all. Do innovation stagnates so that corporations can maximize shareholder value; because the focus of a corporation isn’t to innovate, or improve what they do, their focus is always on extracting the most value for the least cost.
Therefore, monopolies will almost certainly lead to a sub-optimal product. The people that suffer for this are the users of that product. In the case of something like Google search, that’s basically everyone.
There’s a more modern term for this phenomenon: enshittification. Actively making a product worse specifically for the purposes of creating profits for shareholders.
Late stage capitalism is fun, isn’t it?
I would argue that capitalist monopolies are the problem.
There are examples where a “monopoly” has 100% of the market and they do a good job, usually in non-profit driven contexts. To provide an example: there’s only one organization in pretty much any given area, that handles extinguishing fires. Usually called the fire department, and it’s run by the local body of government in a monopoly context.
They still do a great job, but there’s no competition in fire fighting.
They’re not inherently profit driven.
Also, hats off to the firefighters out there, you guys are awesome. Anyways, back to my point.
There are good organizations that operate a monopoly in their service segment. They’re just typically owned and operated by a democratically elected government. Of the people, for the people, by the people.
Any monopoly that is profit driven, especially any that are capitalistic, will succumb to enshittification, 100% of the time, it’s just a matter of when it happens. The only time that it is possible to not have that happen, is in privately owned corporations, which are rare… But the leadership believes in improving the product more than profiteering. But on a long enough time line, that will also fail because inevitably someone will buy the company or inherit it, and they will want to maximize their profits over everything.
It will always happen when things are privately held, and especially if they’re publicly traded.