Virtual Monopolies:

Monopoly Power on the Web

E-Commerce challenges traditional approaches to assessing monopolistic practices due to the rapid rate of growth, rapid change in technology, difficulty in assessing market share for information products like web sites, and high degree of interconnectivity and alliance formation among corporations. This paper has provided a fundamental framework that integrates an economic and network perspective to understand IT markets. This framework was applied to the search engine market. Critical characteristics of the search engine market (for the core 29 search engines), including major players, search techniques, network structure, and market structure were assessed.