Art Carden demonstrates vulgar libertarinism

last updated 2023-09-11

An AIER article by Art Carden named Google is Not a Monopoly calls for a rebuttal and is a great example of "vulgar libertarianism", the term coined by Kevin Carson for libertarians who can't distinguish free markets from government-backed corporations.

Google is Not a Monopoly

Vulgar libertarianism

First, Google isn’t the only firm in the search and search advertising space–or web browsing, or word processing, or any of the other fields in which Google does business. Within my Google Chrome browser yesterday, I was able to switch my default search engine from Google to DuckDuckGo with just a few clicks. I could delete Chrome and have Safari, Opera, Firefox, or Brave running the way I want it in a matter of minutes. I’m typing this in Google Docs, but it wouldn’t be hard to switch to Word, Pages, a typewriter, quill and ink on parchment, or another word processing solution.

It's true that Google isn't a strict monopoly in any of these spaces, but Opera and Brave are based on Chromium, which means they're effectively also controlled by Google, and Safari is, with some caveats, restricted to Mac and iOS. That leaves only Firefox as a true alternative to a Google browser for most of us. Technically there are other browsers based on the WebKit engine, like GNOME's Epiphany, but in my experience they are so buggy as to be useless.

And I hope "a typewriter" and "quill and ink on parchment" are jokes. Those don't accomplish the same thing at all.

I don’t use Google products because they’re the only feasible option or because switching from one platform to another is particularly onerous. I use Google products because they offer convenience and quality at a price of $0.

Oof. $0, really? This is where I think the article gets really bad, because it's where it really should've mentioned all the government subsidies Google receives:

https://www.siliconvalleywatcher.com/googles-billions-in-internet-subsidies/

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/jul/02/us-cities-and-states-give-big-tech-93bn-in-subsidies-in-five-years-tax-breaks

https://qz.com/1145669/googles-true-origin-partly-lies-in-cia-and-nsa-research-grants-for-mass-surveillance/

A staple of libertarian critique of state welfare is that things that come from the government aren't free, rather we're being forced to pay for them regardless of whether we want them; so it's shameful for a libertarian to fail to recognize it here.

Also, Google owns many *patents*. I don't know what Art Carden or AIER believe about intellectual property (and my own stance is not the libertarian standard), but they should at least recognize and mention the injustice of patents, which can be enforced even against independent invention. Therefore, by owning patents Google threatens to use state violence against innocents.

My own stance on intellectual property