Downside of dominance

Outage of Google's services shows the risk of concentration

The brief outage of Google’s services on Monday highlighted one aspect of market dominance that is often overlooked when considering monopolistic market scenarios. If everybody is reliant on a single service provider and that entity is incapacitated, for whatever reasons, the negative impact is devastating. This is especially worth mentioning in the context of the antitrust suits filed recently in the US against Google and Facebook. Those suits allege that the two tech giants have variously abused market dominance to prevent competition from arising. Economic theorists assume, with good reason, that competition is good for consumers. But the outage on