Facebook, Amazon, and Google. What comes to your mind when I say the names of these three companies? They are all company giants that play a large role in many peoples' everyday lives. We get our information from Google, we socialize with our friends on Facebook, and we've all been accused of looking on Amazon at 2 in the morning for things we don't need. These companies have successfully done what many others have done in the past and created a monopoly on their specific market (I know the article doesn't explicitly recognize Facebook as a monopoly, but when you've got everyone ranging from 13 year olds to my grandmother on there, it might as well be a monopoly. While I agree with this article that the giants of those three companies shouldn't be doing what they're doing (controlling the content we see, remove books just to receive more money from a company, or using an ambiguous algorithm to determine what sites get seen), they have the right to do all of those things. Why? Because they're a monopoly.
We gave them right to do whatever they desired when we allowed the corner market. You may be able to use alternative sites and convince yourself that you're making difference, but nothing would change. This isn't the first, nor will it be the last, time that a company has used the fact that it was a monopoly for their own gain. De Beers had a monopoly on the diamond game for twenty years and Crayola will probably be forever associated with crayons. That's just what monopolies do, and using Microsoft's Bing won't change that, we can only wait it out until the next new thing monopolizes the market. It's just the way it is.
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