Google Will Become Prey, Not the Predator

Although monopolies get a bad rap, they’re not always a bad thing. In the short term, modern monopolies are often a boon to consumers. They bring valuable new inventions to market, and, in the case of platforms, they build new communities and markets that would not exist otherwise.

The downside comes much later, as the monopolist ages and starts to crowd out potential new competitors without delivering new value. As legal expert and author Tim Wu said, monopolies “tend to be good-to-great in the short term and bad-to-terrible in the long term.”