Why a Monopoly Is a Good Thing
March 23, 2010
Andrew Carnegie, Leland Stanford, good old JP Morgan, and lots of Rockefellers knew one thing: monopolies are a good thing. The reason is that when a company controls the market, consumers do what the monopolist wants. Like what’s the choice.
I thought about this quirk of capitalism when I read “Microsoft’s Browser Loses Market Share in Europe.” Usage data is fuzzy at best. This write up suggests that when European users when given a choice of browsers choose something other than what Microsoft once offered as * the choice *. For me, the interesting comment was:
According to web statistics firm Statcounter, Internet Explorer’s share of all Web surfing has in March dropped in France by 2.5 percentage points from February, in Britain by 1 percentage point and in Italy by 1.3 points.
I wonder what JP Morgan would do if he were running an Internet company? Would he focus on good or would he work to build a walled garden and put his customers inside? We will never know. My hunch is that JP would go for the monopoly even though he had to do some extra negotiating.
Stephen E Arnold, March 23, 2010
No one paid me to write this article. I like JP. He loaned money to the US government. What a guy. I will report my getting zero money for this article to the Treasury Department, which as I recall, seems to have a no money situation as well. Not even JP could print the stuff.
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