Panocracy 85

And then there was one

The Case of Big G

“Google’s mission is to organise the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” - Google

“For more than a decade, Google has unlawfully maintained its monopolies in general search services and search text advertising through a web of anticompetitive practices.” - position of Plaintiff in US versus Google LLC

Big G has grown over the past 3 decades from an outsider in the search engine domain to a multi-faceted behemoth with global reach.

There is only one word for this: success!

However, one of the major causes of resentment by various parties (Google’s competitors) is the dominance of a market (in this case internet search and web browsers) by a single entity, and by inference the individuals who control it. It's not new: the names Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan, Vanderbilt are now, fairly or not, linked to the term Robber Baron. These people were the Gates, Bezos, Fink and Musk of the 19th century.

The kind of tricks Big G can play are easy to understand. For example, only a few of the search results for a given query appear on the first page. You might naively think these would be unbiased and are the results you'd want to see but Big G can easily bias the most prominent results to other Big G properties or large advertising account holders. In fact, this can be used to snuff out competitors, results unfavourable to important advertisers and those whose opinions may not chime with the prevailing political ideologies.

And when you're on Google, it's collecting information about you all the time. This is the price you pay for a free service from a multinational which is at liberty to sell the information it has collected on you to the highest bidder.

Don't get me wrong, I admire Big G's innovations. Thirty years ago it would have been incomprehensible that we could view in detail and at will a specific building just about anywhere on Earth.

And of course Big G is not alone. All the other large internet companies play the same type of tricks on their users. The manifest objective is increased revenue for the company and its shareholders. And as a happy(?) by-product, more executive power and political influence.

Different countries try to handle monopolistic behaviour, or big business as it's usually known, in broadly similar ways. For example here in Blighty our government created the Monopolies and Restrictive Practices Commission in 1949. This begat the Monopolies Commission which begat the Monopolies and Mergers Commission which begat the Competition Commission which begat the Competition and Markets Authority. The idea was to break up a commercial monopoly which had come (in their opinion) to dominate the market and therefore (again in their opinion) control prices.

Given the performance of British commerce and manufacturing since 1949, we might question whether these creations have been helpful.

The general belief amongst the credentialed classes seems to be that monopolies are a bad idea and at first sight it seems to be obviously true.

But is that so? Given that it has happened time and again that some group has come to dominate in some area – health care (for example Britain's NHS), empires, monarchies, churches – it seems to be a fact of life.

And yet many are uncomfortable with it.

Why should we think that commercial monopolies are a bad thing when we accept without objection the ultimate monopolist: the State? Why should we not apply the same standard to government as we do to commerce?

We may fear that monopolistic commerce will cause prices to rise more than we can afford; are we really scared that Google will entirely take over the internet and we'll have no choice but to use its services, however bad or expensive they might become?

On the other hand many seem to believe that the State is not self-interested or that it at least has its citizens' well-being close to its heart.

Recent history should disabuse us of this. The State has grown to be a self-serving Leviathan even in so-called liberal democracies. For example, it hoovers up a higher proportion of our income with each new budget; it's almost impossible now for a citizen to avoid falling foul of some law or regulation as more appear daily.

Now it may be that Big G's market dominance is slipping as advertisers look for value for money that has been eroded by Big G's price hikes. So this market may well be self-correcting and Google's near monopoly will break without legal forcing. We should remember that the commercial success of Google (and other near monopolies) is mainly down to people 'voting with their feet' – or in this case with their clicks.

It might be argued that private monopolies are in fact encouraged by the State via patronage such as licensing, subsidies, regulatory hurdles to entry by competitors, or byzantine regulatory regimes that deter small operators. It might be argued that the huge fortunes of the Robber Barons, old and new, were as much due to political savvy as to commercial acumen.

The State, however, is the ultimate monopoly. And there is no mechanism short of foreign invasion, revolution or military coup to break it up or even repair its failing institutions. In practice the institutions which make it up aren't answerable to the democratic process even if their parliamentary overlords nominally are.

As we've seen in Britain agencies that fail (for example the Monopolies commission or the Financial Services Authority (after its incompetence during the 2007-2008 financial crash) are rebadged rather than reformed. The same people continue to run the show – with only cosmetic changes.

It will be interesting to see how much headway the proposed US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) under messrs. Musk and Ramaswamy can make. As a non-governmental entity, DOGE will operate like a commission or advisory board so their dog won’t have any teeth but must rely on 'soft power' in a hostile bureaucratic environment.

Let’s Fix the Fixers

In our panocracy, we may or may not decide to have commissions to break up perceived monopolies. There may be more important matters for a population to concern itself with. Such things have been determined up till now by over-confident and under-informed politicians, bureaucrats and lobbyists. With these functions gone, commercial success will depend much more on quality than on political machinations.

It's time such issues were referred to the citizenry who can bring common sense, breadth and depth to the debate that is utterly lacking in the credentialed class.

As a footnote, recently I've been working on other projects which have been taking a lot of effort but I hope to have more time next year to spend on a prototype panocracy that you can try out for yourself.