The tech lords of Silicon Valley have never been short on arrogance, but as Mark Zuckerberg just learned, they are not invulnerable to public and political backlash over their data-mining of our personal information for sale to the highest bidders.  Conservatives have long complained that the ability of Facebook and Google to channel information and exclude conservative media outlets (and ideas) from widespread distribution on their networks and search engines poses a danger to open political discourse.

While Mark Zuckerberg soon faces a grilling in testimony before Congress, Google faces a different sort of challenge, according to an analysis by Michael A. Ball of Seeking Alpha.  He writes that Microsoft has relatively quietly and steadily working to make its search engine, Bing, a vigorous challenger to Google and is already achieving surprising (to me) success.

Although people may not be aware of the capabilities of Bing, the similarities between Google (GOOG, GOOGL) and Bing are narrowing every year.  It is for this reason alone that I believe Bing's market share has improved dramatically – from under 10%, to racing its way towards 25%.

Source: Statistica.

Note that while Ask.com is mentioned but not visible on the graph, Duckduckgo, which explicitly eschews the collection of private data of its users, is not even noted as a factor.  Yahoo has been basically driven from the marketplace as an independent search engine.  I am not aware of Bing's policy on collecting user data, but given its corporate parent, I would not assume the most favorable privacy policy.

Source: Pexels.com.

The broader point is that the awesome market power of behemoths like Facebook and Google may be far more vulnerable than investors and rivals have assumed.  The loss in market capitalization of Facebook, in the tens of billions of dollars, seems to indicate that investors are catching on.  Google's market share of 75-80% is still enviable, but the trend is not its friend, as public concern and anger over data-mining continue to grow.

YouTube, a subsidiary of Alphabet, Google's parent, is another beneficiary of being the market leader and therefore default source of videos when a consumer wishes to find something.  Its practices of demonetizing selected users – most famously and outrageously, demonetizing Prager University (an utterly respectable educational project that happens to be conservative) – risks provoking reactions that could destroy its most valuable asset: the presumed universality of its database and the consumer habit of visiting it first.

Hat tip: Paul Tholfsen