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Comment by cannonedhamster | Hacker News Reader

You mean software companies owning their own aggregator storefronts? Yes. I'd for banning Steam or Epic from both making games and owning the storefront if it meant Apple and Google had to give them up too. No one says music companies or even movie companies can't sell their own stuff on their own site. What they are saying is that just like the antitrust laws made it illegal for movie companies to also own the theaters, no one in thIe digital age should be able to vertically or horizontally monopolize either. I.E. The law that already exists should apply today too.

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Let’s take that to the next level.

Microsoft couldn’t sell third party software that integrates with Office. GCP and AWS couldn’t run marketplaces that sold services from third party companies like ElasticSearch and Mongo labs. Who would be hurt worse if AWS stop selling ElasticCo and Mongolabs hosted services and just sold their own ElasticSearch service and Mongo compatible DocumentDB?

Walmart couldn’t sell Walmart branded goods. CVS couldn’t sell cheaper versions of name brand drugs, restaurants couldn’t sell name brand sodas and their own food.

How far do you want to take it?

Seeing that if Netflix couldn’t create their own content and had to buy content from third parties do you think that would help Netflix more or give other studios even more leverage to raise their prices?

What if Apple said fine - we can’t offer Apple Music and Spotify so we will just kick Spotify off the platform and not allow third party games and only allow games through Apple Arcade.

They could also kick off Office and force everyone to use iWork.

But why stop there? Let’s also make a law that says Apple can’t sell third party accessories and Apple products in their physical Apple store and Google can’t sell Pixel devices along with third party phones on their website.

How about we just enforce the law that already exists. You completely missed where I said outlawing aggregated storefronts, and just went to a straw man argument I didn't make. Netflix making their own content and being a distributor is against vertical integration laws, it's just not being enforced. Microsoft selling their own product isn't an issue. Amazon/AWS/Kindle publishing should be forcibly broken up. Amazon controls the entire vertical it's a monopoly that positions it's own products at an advantage. The Microsoft store controlling the only access to Windows would be a problem.

Your AWS example falls flat on it's face the product you're still buying is hosting, not an Elastic license. That's like suggesting because a television comes with a free soundbar it's illegal. No one is suggesting that. Stop using the slippery slope against common sense policies that would prevent the market concentrating on the hands of a few gatekeepers.

You completely missed where I said outlawing aggregated storefronts, Netflix making their own content and being a distributor is against vertical integration laws, it's just not being enforced.

Because that law doesn’t exist.

If it did do you think that every media company could blatantly break that law and the government do nothing?

Microsoft selling their own product isn't an issue.

Microsoft also sells third party products that integrate with their offerings....

Your AWS example falls flat on it's face the product you're still buying is hosting, not an Elastic license.

That is also incorrect. AWS offers its own ElasticSearch hosted service where it can only offer the open source subset,

https://aws.amazon.com/elasticsearch-service/

but ElasticCo also sells the full license through the AWS marketplace where they host the commercial version on AWS.

https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/seller-profile?id=d8f5903...

I would be okay with all of this.

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