Monopolists Lie: Framing the Market Big

Because monopolies attract regulators and lawsuits, monopolists have a strong incentive to hide their monopoly. The standard move is to define their market as enormous so their share looks small.

Google is the canonical case. Framed as a search company, it owned around two thirds of the market, and its share was even more dominant by usage. But Google describes itself as an advertising company (a few percent of global advertising) or a technology company (a sliver of the vast consumer tech market). Same company, harmless-looking numbers.

The lesson for reading the market: when a dominant company talks about the huge, fragmented space it competes in, that is often camouflage. Successful monopolists frame their markets as the union of several big ones.