More on Monopolies

Following on from Geoff’s post on Information Empires and Monopolies, this article looks at The New Generation Of American Monopolies and considers a firm a monopoly “when a company has such effective control of its market that it can set prices and stifle innovation by depriving competition of any chance of profit. The offending company only has to continue to do extraordinarily well in its field regardless of what antitrust regulators have to say. 24/7 Wall St. found ten instances that could be considered de facto monopolies though the government will not take action in each case.”

The top ten monopolies by market share are listed below:

1. Product: Search Engine GOOGLE
Market Share: 90.1%
Competition: Yahoo!, Bing

2. Product: MicroSoft Windows
Market Share: 89.7%
Competition: Mac OS X, Linux

3. Product: Facebook
Market Share: 63.8%
Competition: MySpace, Linked In, Twitter

4. Product: Netflix
Market Share: 61%
Competition: Blockbuster, Hulu, Vudu

5. Product: Intel
Market Share: 80.3%
Competition: AMD

6. Product: I-PAD
Market Share: 73%
Competition: Android, Samsung

7. Product: I-Tunes Market Share: 70%
Competition: Amazon.com, Wal-Mart Music Downloads

8. Product: Kindle
Market Share: 67%
Competition: Barnes & Noble, Sony

9. Product: Sirrus Radio
Market Share: 100%
Competition: None

10. Product: PayPal
Market Share: N/A
Competition: Google Checkout, Fiserv, CashEdge