The "Senate Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee" claimed last week that the truly dominant companies in media distribution these days were Facebook, Google, Apple and Amazon. "Alphabet," which is the parent company of Google and Facebook are among the 10 largest companies in the world. Alphabet alone has a market capitalization of around $550 billion. AT&T and Time Warner combined would be about $300 billion.
"Facebook is without question in a dominant position, if not the dominant position, for content delivery," as stated by Mark Cuban an internet entrepreneur.
"Alphabet" has an 83 percent share of the mobile search market in the United States and just under 63 percent of the US mobile phone operating systems market. AT&T has a 32 percent market share in mobile phones and 26 percent in pay TV. The combined AT&T-Time Warner will have $8 billion in cash but $171 billion of net debt compared to Alphabet's balance sheet, with total cash of $76 billion and total debt of about $3.94 billion.
Google and Facebook can achieve huge net profit margins because they dominate the content made available on the web while making very little of it then. Every pirated music video or song posted on "YouTube or Facebook" robs the creators of income, and YouTube in particular is dominated by unlicensed content. "Google's YouTube" has an over 55 percent market share in the streaming audio business and yet provides less than 11 percent of the streaming audio revenues to the content owners and creators.
In the past decade, an enormous reallocation of revenue of perhaps $50 billion a year has taken place, with economic value moving from creators of content to owners of monopoly platforms. And yet, by every available metric, people are consuming more music, video, news and books. During that same period, "Google's Revenue" grew to $74.5 billion from $400 million.
