The best thing that you could be doing with market dominance is making a change for the better.
What did Apple do with its market dominance? It killed the CPU-hungry and battery-unfriendly Adobe Flash technology, and adopted open standards that any other manufacturer can implement, too, for increased interoperability and convenience of everyone involved (other than Adobe, of course, as well as the people who were too lazy or incompetent to use HTML5 instead of Adobe Flash for making their web-sites).
What did Google do with their market dominance? Through Google Mail and Google Voice, it brought affordable email and telephone solutions to the market, eliminated the need to pay huge fees for text messaging, as well as the ability to have mnemonic telephone numbers for mere mortals.
But what about the rest of the industry? How come most public entities entirely disregard the need to use their market dominance for the greater good?
Say, LowEndBox.com, is arguably the dominant place to get offers on highly competitive VPS hosting. Yet, IMHO, they are currently failing to use their market dominance to improve the market place. Why are there still providers around that offer hosting services without providing any test IPs (let alone download files)? Or even precise locations of their data-centres? Or virtualisation technologies (“Xen PV” is entirely different from “Xen HVM”; WTF is “Xen”?). Or whether or not they support IPv6.
The IPv6 is an interesting topic, IMHO. This year, on 2012-06-06, is the http://www.WorldIPv6Launch.org/ . Even the behemoth US telecoms like AT&T and ubiquitous CDNs like Akamai and Limelight, together with Google and Facebook, have agreed to permanently enable IPv6 for its subscribers, for good. Yet many hosting providers are still keeping quiet about their IPv6 support. (Many actually do support it, so the sole quietness on the subject is not an indication that support is surely lacking). IMHO, sites like LowEndBox.com have a moral obligation to the internet society at large, to use its powers to promote stuff like IPv6 (which is now finally so close to actually being useful within a couple of months) and other transparency. It’s entirely easy to make a simple rule of clearly stating whether IPv6 is supported or not, in every post, making it clear who is who in the business, and giving the clear incentive to the providers in supporting IPv6.
