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Comment by cycomanic | Hacker News Reader

Standard oil? Antitrust is only a waste of taxpayers' money if there's no real willingness to go after the offenders.

What happened to Microsoft? Microsoft still controls 70-90% market share of computer operating system industry. Amazon, Google, Facebook and Apple achieved dominant market position through legal and fair market competition.

People stopped caring about Windows being dominant years ago. Mac and Linux became competitive for those who wanted it, mobile ate the world, and Windows only dominates in Office and gaming, neither of which are apparently worth fighting over.

>Windows only dominates in Office and gaming, neither of which are apparently worth fighting over.

Everyone and everything is worth fighting over.

Agree personally, I just mean the general population doesn't care anymore.

I think that's less an indictment of anti-trust lawsuits being effective and more of an indictment of either a lack of knowledge or willful ignorance around how connected the economy was becoming via computers.

Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Facebook are all companies that are beyond a reasonable scale - there are far too many eggs in those baskets for long term economic health. Those companies are making GD, Raytheon and Lockheed look like kids playing in a sandbox.

>Those companies are making GD, Raytheon and Lockheed look like kids playing in a sandbox.

Maybe because >Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Facebook are extremely useful consumer technology companies. I don't know about you but I won't be buying fighter aircraft anytime soon.

Boeing gets about 28.6 Billion from the US government each year[1] given the US population of around 400 million you're giving them (if we spread the cost evenly) about seventy five dollars every year. Once upon a time this was a large sum of money - now-a-days it's probably less than most folks spend on spotify and definitely less folks spend on coffee in a non-pandemic year.

1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2020/01/02/ho...

> Microsoft still controls 70-90% market share of computer operating system industry.

Definitely not, unless you are defining computer in a way that only includes computer form factors that existed in the 90s and also excludes server computers.

That isn't how antitrust works. In the US, having a monopoly is not a crime; abusing a monopoly is. The consent decree had very specific goals and requirements, you can go read about it at Wikipedia. But none of them were about shrinking their market share.

The European EC decision was different, but also was not targeting market share.

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