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<div align=justify>They may not be the power company, but you won't find too many threats to their dominance. All three are not only at the top of their game, they have few, if any, competitors. And the law helps keep newbies out of the market.


'''"But what about Microsoft?"'''

That question could be asked for all three companies, which says something about Microsoft. But except for Microsoft's entertainment division, which has a real hit on its hands with the Xbox 360 Kinect, the tech titan hasn't been doing too well as of late. It's shipping millions of Windows licenses, certainly, but they're mostly on commodity PCs to businesses and budget-minded individuals. And what market share it has for its Bing search engine, it's largely bought with its Windows and Office earnings.

'''Owning the market'''

The fact is, Apple basically owns the tablet and smartphone markets. It sold more than 10 million iPads during just the fourth quarter of 2011, and according to Matt Brian of The Next Web its iPhone accounted for more than two-thirds of the smartphones sold by both AT&T and Verizon. It's making a truckload more money per iPhone sold than any Android smartphone vendor, according to analyst Horace Dediu.

Google, of course, has web search wrapped up, and was also "expected to grab" about three-fourths of all online advertising spending in the US as of November, according to EMarketer Inc. as quoted by Bloomberg's Brian Womack. Facebook's recent SEC filing shows that it's only making build its own Facebook competitor. (It's not working.)

'''Natural or artificial monopolies?'''

Unlike with the electric company -- where the high cost of capital keeps new competitors from stringing wires to everyone's homes -- nothing's assumed to be keeping others from making their own smartphones, search engines, or social networks. That's why all three markets are largely unregulated, compared to "natural monopolies" like public utilities.

'''But it's not as easy as all that.'''

First, you have network effects to consider, like how there are tens of thousands of apps for Apple's iPad and none of them work on Android tablets. Or how all of your friends are on Facebook, and you need a Facebook account just to talk to them. Apple and Facebook legally own these areas, and while you can switch to another tablet or social network you lose everything you'd invested in Apple or Facebook's platform. There's no law requiring them to use open-source code or open standards, of the sort that let Dreamwidth and LiveJournal users "friend" each other across networks, or that let the same apps run on all Android smartphones. (Let's not even get into how Google owns the Android Market.)

Second, a virtuous feedback loop keeps these powerful companies getting more and more powerful. Apple is said to be able to buy up the entire world's stock of certain desirable hardware components, because of its tens of billions in the bank. And the more people use Google's web advertising instead of a competitor's, the less those competitors have to invest in product advancements, even as Google uses its web search to promote its own Google+ social network over everyone else's.

'''There may be a way around this'''

Facebook came out of nowhere, and whatever replaces it might do that too. But right now, the odds (and the laws) are stacked against whatever the new Facebook is, because they're letting the old Facebook -- and Apple, and Google -- run roughshod over everyone else. </div>

''Taken from http://yahoo.com''
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