Google Search Monopoly
https://www.wabe.org/google-paid-apple-billions-to-dominate-search-on-iphones-justice-department-says/
The justice department has a lawsuit against google recently for its monopoly power. Justice department says that Google had a deal with apple to have all apple devices have their default engine set as Google’s search engine. Apple also derives 1/5 of their revenue due to their collaboration with Google according to the article. One of the apple employees also said that “Our vision is to work as if we are one company,” “This isn’t classic collusion, where two rivals agree to raise prices and each benefits,” said John Newman, a former Justice Department antitrust lawyer who is now a law professor at the University of Miami. “It looks more like one monopolist agreeing with another company to split the monopoly rent.”
So Google in this example is trying to be the node that leads into the web or the large strongly connected component. In the Google example with Apple, the google search page would have a really high page rank because we know that the google search page would lead to a lot of different pages. Apple products are very popular, so there will be a large pool of users. And by having a high amount of people that have to enter this specific node to enter the web will make the companies revenue higher, thus making google sustain their monopoly status. Google is very aggressive in its way of making sure that the company maintains its status of being the dominant search engine by cooperating with Apple at such a huge cost.
We can consider Google’s search page a hub that leads to authorities. Let’s think about the mass users that use the Google’s search function. By using Google’s search to search for authorities, what it is doing essentially is giving the Google search (the hub) higher and higher rank. What this is doing is that it is going to make Google higher and higher in the ranking system. And this will be true especially if we try to calculate scores for the hubs and authorities. We will find out that after rounds and rounds, the google search page’s rank will get higher and higher. This is essentially how Google maintains its monopoly status. And by cooperating with Apple, another big company, Google is making its scores even higher.