The Internet and its impact on Market Structure - Managerial Economics Essay

The Internet and its impact on Market Structure - Managerial Economics - Essay Example Monopoly is a market that no one desires to be in. In developed countries there are laws against monopoly. It’s bad enough for consumers. Whenever there are even close resemblances of monopolies emerge, like Microsoft in the global operating systems market, people have cried foul. Even big corporations shy away from becoming a monopoly because it attracts too much regulation from the authorities and negative publicity from the public. So it’s unlikely that the typical monopoly can ever exist on a global scale. For local monopolies Internet has definitely made life difficult. With internet in place, entry barriers are so low that as soon as a company becomes successful with a new product or concept idea there would be new start-ups offering substitute products. So it would be safe to conclude that the Internet is anti-monopoly. The world markets tend to favor oligopolies. Internet has been one for the key components that changed quite a few market structures in several industries. Internet, for instance, is a substitute for all media. The media industry has been revolutionized with the advent of Internet. It has reduced the barriers of entry to such a low level that some industries will never be the same. Perfect oligopolies exist all over the world in several industries. In liberalized and privatized economies even public utilities are oligopolies. High level of globalization and the Internet have helped oligopolies to form and exist. â€Å"But all the past revolutions have not ended up in a totally free market, but rather have started a new cycle of oligopolies.† (The Internet and the copyright oligopolies 2003). The pattern that one could see is that when a new company becomes successful with a new product or concept it is merged or acquired by big companies and this usually pulls the market away from monopolies and from prefect competition. This is a market structure that has a large