Does 92% usage make something a monopoly? 95%? 99%? 100%?

I think that the percentage argument is not the only important thing to consider, there are other anti-competitive practices which (when practiced at a large enough scale) become a monopoly even if "only" 50% of people use the product (friendly reminder that 50% of internet users is more than a billion people -- much larger than the population of most countries).

My point is not that Google is doing something illegal (and thus arguing over the legal definition of a monopoly is not helpful -- just like arguing over the legal meaning of the US 1st Amendment is not helpful in discussions over the concept of free speech). I'm arguing that it is a monopoly in the ordinary meaning of the word, in that effectively everyone uses Google and Google exerts a massive amount of power over their users.

But for a pseudo-legal argument: Google participates in a form of product tying[1] by requiring you to create a Google account in order to access Google Groups (which are publicly-run mailing lists and an unrelated product to their account service). Now since you don't pay for Google accounts this isn't a strict violation of anti-trust laws, but it is very close in concept to the sort of thing anti-trust laws protect against.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce)

> Does 92% usage make something a monopoly? 95%? 99%? 100%?

100% certainly would.

> I'm arguing that it is a monopoly in the ordinary meaning of the word, in that effectively everyone uses Google and Google exerts a massive amount of power over their users.

What do you mean by "the ordinary meaning of the word" here? It's also not clear to me that "effectively everyone uses Google".

91% of internet users is about 3 billion people. They control a platform that affects more people than any single nation state (2-3x larger than the largest nation state and larger than the top 3 countries combined). For instance, changes in PageRank (which is an unaccountable and unauditable algorithm) affect every user of their site in terms of what links they see, what articles they read, and by extension what they think.

You might argue it's the fault of users for not being informed, but I think that if a company has a significant impact on the lives of 3 billion people (which again, is a larger influence than any single government on this planet -- and nation states have constitutions and laws specifically to ensure that they serve the people and are accountable) then it has reached the point where it either needs to be broken up or be regulated. I don't care which, I just think that this cowboy mentality (that software is somehow special and lives in a world where regulation is always an unreasonable viewpoint to have) has to stop at some point.

Regarding the term monopoly, there are different views on what precisely the term means. Google does have anti-competitive practices which you might argue make them act as a monopoly. You can argue they have a monopoly on internet searches because whenever they change PageRank in a way that negatively impacts some users (or when they make changes to GMail's spam filter so that it starts blocking valid emails) there isn't a rush to a different service because there is no way to co-ordinate such a rush. Instead you have other secondary industries like SEO which exist purely to try to keep websites reachable from Google. The fact they have the power to manipulate how the majority of sites operate clearly means they have significant (and in my view monopolistic) control over the market.

They also have a market share that is actually incomprehensible. Microsoft was indicted under anti-trust laws because of Internet Explorer being bundled with Windows. I think Google acts as much more of a monopoly than Microsoft did in the 90s, and "good guy Google" really is an outdated mental model for a company with that much influence over people's lives.

> But for a pseudo-legal argument: Google participates in a form of product tying[1] by requiring you to create a Google account in order to access Google Groups (which are publicly-run mailing lists and an unrelated product to their account service).

That seems to be false; I can read mailing lists hosted at Google Groups without logging in (for instance https://groups.google.com/a/groups.riscv.org/forum/#!forum/i... opens for me without asking for a login). I'm subscribed to that mailing list from an email address which is not a Google account, and I didn't have to log in to any Google account when I subscribed. I can post to that mailing list directly from a normal email client, through a non-Google email provider.

The link you just posted requires me to log in, and I've had this problem with go-nuts and the OCI mailing list in the past. It's strange this doesn't happen to you -- maybe it's a geographically specific thing (I'm connecting from Australia)?

Of course you don't need to login in order to post on the mailing list, but I think that's only one of the three main features of a mailing list (broadcast, subscription, and archival) that I can do without logging in.

I am not required to login from the US.