Yaakov: Yes, the real question here is whether one can make other
distribution patterns viable by making other business models possible.
On Wednesday, November 6, 2013, Yaakov Stein wrote:
There was discussion at this morning’s plenary about the benefit of
dispersal of information between a large number of service providers
(in particular it was mentioned that there are currently only 10 email
providers).
Unfortunately, there are strong economic reasons that have led to us
having on the Internet basically a single search provider - Google,
(although Yahoo is perhaps catching up), Facebook as a single social
network (LinkedIn being far behind),
Amazon as a single web store, eBay as a single consumer to consumer
marketplace, etc.
and perhaps a very small number of free email providers.
In all of these cases there were originally a number of competitors, and
one pulled out way ahead of the others.
The precise reason for this happening may be slightly different for each
case,
but it is highly unlikely that this situation will change for any of them.
Y(J)S