Linked List: July 16, 2019

Tuesday, 16 July 2019

Business Insider: ‘Google Is Trying to Convince Congress It Has Search Competition’ ★

Nick Bastone, reporting for Business Insider:

“In our core search business, consumers can choose among a range of options: Bing, DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and many more,” Cohen said. “Specialized search services are strong competitors, too, including companies like Amazon, eBay, Kayak, Travelocity, Yelp, and others.”

But recent statistics paint a different picture. According to StatCounter, Google accounts for over 92% of the search engine market share worldwide as of this June.

Its closest competitor, Bing, accounted for just over 2.5% of the market.

Competition isn’t the right word. Yes, there are competing search engines, clearly. The right word is monopoly, and it’s just as clear that Google has a very strong monopoly on the search engine market. Monopolies aren’t illegal — but monopoly holders are subject to regulations that non-monopoly competitors are not. That’s the issue. Google’s argument shouldn’t be to simply say that they have competition, it should be to say that they compete fairly.

That might be a tough argument for them to make while under oath.

The Omega Speedmaster: The Watch That Went to the Moon ★

Krishnadev Calamur, writing for The Atlantic:

In other words, the Speedmaster and watches like it provide a sense of permanence in an age with little of it. The Speedmaster available today is virtually the same as the one Aldrin wore on the moon, or indeed the one Omega introduced way back in 1957, as a tool for race-car drivers.

It is unchanged because there’s nothing to change: The mechanical watch is, along with the bicycle, an arguably perfect invention. If wound every day and serviced regularly, it can run for perpetuity. There aren’t many things you can say that about in our era of fast fashion and biennial phone upgrades.

This is, to me, exactly the appeal of mechanical watches.