I mean, your choices for flying somewhere are what - Delta or United? Some small regional carriers? What about for internet service - just a single ISP in most areas. Sometimes a monopoly by law, where no one else can lay fiber and they're free to charge as much as they want.
Your choices for searching something on the internet, hosting a video, doing email, etc. are innumerable.
So you'll have to qualify what you mean by "negative impact" before I can answer that.
I don't think transportation is a good analogue because it is very easy to make substitutions. There are lots of ways to get from point A to point B with no single entity blocking your path.
How many ways are there to publish a mobile app, for example?
I generally describe myself as libertarian but I'm struggling to have a laissez-faire attitude about some aspects of big tech. I think the most frustrating thing is the lack of "due process" in the way that big tech deals with customers. Look at the recent story about the ridiculous review process for Chrome extensions. I could tell similar stories about the app stores.
> I’ve never had my searches for coronavirus related content restricted in any way by my ISP for example.
Your ISP isn't a search engine. It's also regulated more like a utility, unlike Google. If your ISP started black-holing IP addresses for reason of the content they carried, there would be Congressional action (if the FCC didn't get there first).
Because of network effects that turns out to be a lot weaker protection against much more powerful companies.
Edit: Perhaps network effect is the wrong term - but it’s a bit like saying if you don’t like guns don’t buy a gun - that doesn’t really limit the negative impacts from guns...
The capital costs might actually be similar (or higher for AWS). The margins, of course, are much lower for an airline.
The best data point I can find is that Google spent 13B on datacenter and office construction in 2019, which is about the same as the purchase cost of all 130 of Delta Airlines' 737-900ER aircraft (which is about 1/6 of Delta's entire fleet).
> The best data point I can find is that Google spent 13B on datacenter and office construction in 2019
It’s hard to do a fair comparison like this between high growth companies and normal companies - for example what fraction of that cost for Google is growth based vs to maintain exisiting services?
Your choices for searching something on the internet, hosting a video, doing email, etc. are innumerable.
So you'll have to qualify what you mean by "negative impact" before I can answer that.