This is simply a virtual form of real estate business.
As real estate brokers say, the price depends mostly on 3 things: location, location and location. If you are on Manhattan you pay more for that land than far away in Brooklyn. Similarly with the Domain Name System - shorter domain like www.abc.com is more desirable than www.hdhfjenyrj.goobledygook. There is no scarcity of string combinations for domain names yet people fight for desirable ones by paying a lot of money. It's a form of congestion pricing around naturally formed monopoly in desirable locations or domains.
These big tech platforms create their own land online - virtual estate. Limited human attention creates the scarcity of valuable locations where advertisers would like to show their ads. So they compete for being shown on Manhattan of the web - Google's top of the search results and Facebook's feed. The platforms can charge them huge monopoly, real estate like, prices for it.
Where that analogy falls short is that if a given company pays for cheap and/or inferior real estate, you will still find that company if you explicitly go to their physical location – you don't have to walk past four competitors who paid extra for the right to stand in their driveway.
This just isn't how a majority of people find sites, though. To your normal users, google may as well be the address bar. Hell, I've watched users go to google, type facebook.com (or wherever they're going) into google, and then click on the first ad link.
So, you have this situation where typing basecamp.com into google may not bring basecamp as the first result and the people buying the ads know that.
> But it could not be simpler or easier to bypass Google.
My point was that your run-of-the-mill user doesn't do this. It is easy to bypass, but how many people actually do it? You're just saying to me that people should become power users or just accept that they're victims of manipulative advertising.
Anyway, the rent they're charging is other products masquerading under Bootcamp's popular name. They're essentially charging Bootcamp rent so that "fraudsters" can't eat up the top positions in search results for your product. Grocery stores don't let a Cheerios knock-off named Cheerio-os sit on the end-caps because they paid more than Cheerios. If I go to my grocery store and ask for Cheerios, they'll take me to it - not Cheerio-os because they paid more for me to find them.
It sounds like a racket to me. You can pay google to keep your company at the top of the search results, or they can break your kneecaps by making you hard to find.
And why is rent-seeking behavior something that we want in a search engine we are supposed use to find relevant information?
Voice control is becoming the de facto interface on phones, cars, and home connected devices. That puts Google or Apple directly between you and what you want with no equivalent alternative.
> But it could not be simpler or easier to bypass Google.
Really? Unless you pay Apple considerably more, you will have a google search bar prominently on your phone that you can gimp but cant hide or change to another search provider.
I have been racking my brain for several minutes now trying to figure out what you’re taking about. I never paid Apple anything to switch my Safari search bar to DuckDuckGo, and I can’t imagine 3rd party browsers are restricted from using a plain address bar or any search provider they want
I meant 80% of the market runs Android primarily on hardware price..
If you are using a newer Android, the manufacturer has been coerced to make a google search bar not only prominent but impossible to hide, even manually by the user.
I was thinking about on a desktop, but even on mobile, tapping the browser icon and then tapping the address bar is not a burden from my perspective. Perhaps google is abusing their position as makers of Android, but it’s tough to see a argument to not let them put their own search bar on their own software.
A profit model based on the defaults is certainly pretty reasonable, and eforcing that on manufacturers is perhaps logical, but if a company is afraid of letting the user change the defaults to use different combinations of products that they prefer then you are basically the reason for antitrust legislation. (Either the products require this coercion, few people would switch or you are using a product in one area to prevent new competition in another.)
The same could be said for physical shopping, though. The majority of people are not going to drive out into the countryside or the warehouse district to find your particular clothing store. They're going to walk to the fifth avenue shopping district or Herald Square. And, indeed, your competitors are all there, even if the user intended to go directly to your store. You can easily observe the same phenomenon in the clustering of car dealerships.
I mean the fundamental observation, I feel, is that you don't have a right to be free from competition just because the user has heard your name. To believe otherwise is anti-user and anti-consumer. It is good that Basecamp's competitors can advertise to its potential users, because that increases the level of competition and information in the marketplace.
That was true a couple of decades ago. Notice that there aren't address bars on most browsers people use nowadays, and the change happened pretty much due to Google's interference.
I don’t know what your definition of address bar is, but all 4 of the big browsers have a space at the top where you can enter a full website address and be taken directly to the website.
Which is exactly why some companies have an explicit strategy of placing their locations on the same location as their competitors. IIRC, this happens often in the franchising industry, where a stronger competitor (e.g., McDonald's) will work to position new stores on the same location/intersection as a weaker one (e.g., Wendy's or Burger King). The new location might not be as profitable as their normal criteria, but it will weaken their competitors' profits.
Replace monopoly google with monopoly clear channel and you have exactly that problem.
Your landlord might be renting the wall next to your driveway to Clear Channel or the neighbor might own it and rent it to them. But if it can fit a billboard and be seen from the street it will have one in metro areas where that isn't illegal.
(Additionally) they* have been known to be geo-targeted on particular firms/individuals to mislead, i.e. make the purchaser believe they got better coverage. Probably the most famous example is hiding them from a target instead:
[*] To be clearer, they == "poster campaigns", I have no idea about specific roles to say they = "Clear Channel" in examples of targeted/misleading campaigns.
As real estate brokers say, the price depends mostly on 3 things: location, location and location. If you are on Manhattan you pay more for that land than far away in Brooklyn. Similarly with the Domain Name System - shorter domain like www.abc.com is more desirable than www.hdhfjenyrj.goobledygook. There is no scarcity of string combinations for domain names yet people fight for desirable ones by paying a lot of money. It's a form of congestion pricing around naturally formed monopoly in desirable locations or domains.
These big tech platforms create their own land online - virtual estate. Limited human attention creates the scarcity of valuable locations where advertisers would like to show their ads. So they compete for being shown on Manhattan of the web - Google's top of the search results and Facebook's feed. The platforms can charge them huge monopoly, real estate like, prices for it.