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Comment by simonkafan | Hacker News Reader

In Austria there is a law in place saying if a company has a monopoly (e.g. public transport) or a quasi-monopoly (e.g. only supermarket in a 100 miles radius) the company is required to serve any customer and is not allowed to turn any down.

It is time that all countries introduce laws that prohibit online monopolies from denying access to their users without good reasons.

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Cue the "it's not a monopoly" crowd.

I think we need another word for these companies that are way to big and "monopolize" certain online spaces/communities.

I think that many people confuse "de facto standard" with monopoly. There are certainly other services that can do most if not all of the things Github does, it just doesn't have the audience.

Does GitHub do anything to actively prohibit the use of it's competitors?

Think for private repos gitlab has been a viable and fairly popular alternative for a long time.

I reckon for open source the "de facto standard" plays a much bigger role, because of the user expectation to find projects on Github.

I am in the "it's not a monopoly" crowd and yes we should definitely use other words to describe companies that do not have exclusive control over a commercial activity.

Exclusive control of an activity isn't needed to be a monopoly. In the 90s, people used Netscape on Macs, but Microsoft got declared a monopoly anyway.

First I don't think your Netscape on Mac argument holds up. The antitrust suit was about IE on Windows.

"[...] the U.S. government accused Microsoft of illegally maintaining its monopoly position in the PC market primarily through the legal and technical restrictions it put on the abilities of PC manufacturers (OEMs) and users to uninstall Internet Explorer and use other programs such as Netscape and Java." [0]

"The plaintiffs alleged that Microsoft had abused monopoly power on Intel-based personal computers in its handling of operating system and web browser integration. The issue central to the case was whether Microsoft was allowed to bundle its flagship Internet Explorer (IE) web browser software with its Windows operating system. Bundling them is alleged to have been responsible for Microsoft's victory in the browser wars as every Windows user had a copy of IE." [0]

I do agree that exclusive control may not be needed. However, Microsoft was engaging in other anti-competitive behavior. It's not like they're restricting Windows users to only use GitHub.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

That's kind of my point. Microsoft didn't hold exclusive control over operating systems nor internet browsers, but got called a monopoly in those markets anyway, despite available alternatives. Yes, there was more to it than just that. They merely had a lot of control in the market and was doing shady things.

defactopoly?

Forgive me if I'm mistaken, but I don't think GitHub has a monopoly. Git was created to be decentralized, so every developer has a "backup" of sorts on their own machine.

If GitHub is truely hostile to you, taking your business elsewhere (or hosting it yourself) shouldn't be too much of a roadblock for people with sponsors like OP.

Git being decentralized or not has no bearing on GitHub/Microsoft having a de-facto monopoly here. If you want to bring a counter argument that should at least include the name GitLab.

GitHub and other forges are value added services on top of git. They wouldn't be this popular if it weren't for issue trackers and merge managers, CI and that sort of stuff. They are centralized and can't be migrated out once an account is locked. GitHub can be considered a monopoly because recruiters tend to neglect repos elsewhere. We really need decentralized/federated alternatives to that.

I would argue the market is social Git hosting, of which Gitlab and BitBucket are competitors.

I don't think many people would consider GitHub a monopoly though.

This is a good law and should be applied to big tech.

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