Break Them Up?

Standard Oil was broken up by the federal government in 1911 on anti-trust grounds. At that time it had a 64% market share of the oil refining business.

Standard Oil was eventually cut up into 34 separate entities. This graphic from the Virtual Capitalist gives you some sense of what came out of Standard Oil.

American Telephone & Telegraph had a market share of over 80% when it was broken up in 1984. This graphic show the evolution that has occurred involving AT&T and its Bell company subsidiaries as they were split up and how they eventually reconsolidated among the new AT&T, Verizon, Century Link and Sprint.

Credit:AdvaOptical.com

All of this kind of makes one wonder what will happen to Google in the future which has a 91% market search of all online web searches.

Of course, digital advertising is driven by online searches as well as personal interests that are shared as people interact on the internet. See what this translates into in U.S. digital ad revenues for Google and Facebook who are capturing largest share of digital ad revenues for the simple reason they are capturing the eyeballs of more people on the internet.

Google and Facebook alone are garnering about 2/3 of all digital ad revenues.

That is just two companies!

It is the same in Canada where Google and Facebook have 72% of the digital advertising market.

Looking at total global digital ad revenues, Google and Facebook have 61% of the total. Google has an incredible 44% of total global digital ad revenue by itself.

Even more astounding is the fact that Google and Facebook now have 25% of total global media advertising revenues. As recently as 2012 that number was only 9%.

You see similar concentration when looking at Amazon's domination of online retail sales.

How long will it be before we will begin hearing calls to break-up Google or Amazon?

Not long.

A recent Reuters headline.

A recent tweet by President Trump about Amazon and The Washington Post (both headed by Jeff Bezos).