[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....
It doesn’t do anyone any good to call any of these firms “monopolies.” It’s not accurate, not for any of them.
Nor was monopoly the issue in the Microsoft case (that was about bundling).
There may be reasons to look at antitrust law and to change it with some of these firms and their behaviors in mind but “vertical monopoly” isn’t an accurate characterization of any of them.
Controlling and overcharging use of (one of the few) roads to the market, even in the case there are other roads farther away, and you can build your own road at an incredibly unfeasible cost, is what most people understand as a monopoly situation.
Arguably this is what Apple and Google are doing when they charge exorbitant fees from developers targeting their platform.
No not monopolies like we had like the Bell telephone, but we have 2-3 huge companies that collude and stifle competition.
Proving collusion is hard these days though. Too many fresh faced MBA's who are atheists.
(I'm a Watch Repairer. I can't buy parts from The Swatch Group, or Reichmont. Why do we even have The Sherman Anti-trust Act if it's never used? I'm not saying dissolve these obvious conglomerations, but let's not encourage them. Why was ATT and T-Mobile allowed to combine. To tired to go on, but tired of ogliopolyssssss.
You can't just redefine what words mean if you want to be taken seriously.
Especially when what you described is a legitimate and very common business tactic [1]
That only applies when one of the competitors is effectively a monopoly anyway.
Predatory pricing just needs to be done from a dominant market position, which is absolutely a label that applies to the giant tech firms being discussed. You only need to be in a market position strong enough to wield the pressure needed to force competitors out of market. You absolutely do not need to be effectively a monopoly.
But this may happen even on a highly competitive market, if one company is a large established one (say, controlling 10% of the market), and the other is a small startup. Just make the key differentiating feature which the new competitor is bringing free in your established product for some time. Implement it first, if needed.
AT&T and T-Mobile did not combine, that purchase was (one of the few mergers) blocked by the DOJ under the Obama administration.
T-Mobile did later (2020) buy Sprint, but it was in a far worse position economically than T-Mobile was in 2011 at the time of the attempted AT&T purchase.
What does a person's religious beliefs have to do with hiding collusion? That's a helluva straw man to pull into the conversation, and it completely derails your first point.
I was nodding during your first paragraph, then did a double take to make sure I read the second right.
> I teach antitrust to grads and undergrads.
Consider updating the curriculum? My understanding is that the bundling was actionable because they were considered a monopoly.
These arguments all point to one conclusion: we cannot comfortably say that bundling in platform software markets has so little "redeeming virtue," N. Pac. Ry., 356 U.S. at 5, 78 S.Ct. 514, and that there would be so "very little loss to society" from its ban, that "an inquiry into its costs in the individual case [can be] considered [] unnecessary." Jefferson Parish, 466 U.S. at 33-34, 104 S.Ct. 1551 (O'Connor, J., concurring). We do not have enough empirical evidence regarding the effect of Microsoft's practice on the amount of consumer surplus created or consumer choice foreclosed by the integration of added functionality into platform software to exercise sensible judgment regarding that entire class of behavior. (For some issues we have no data.) "We need to know more than we do about the actual impact of these arrangements on competition to decide whether they ... should be classified as per se violations of the Sherman Act." White Motor, 372 U.S. at 263, 83 S.Ct. 696. Until then, we will heed the wisdom that "easy labels do not always supply ready answers," Broad. Music, 441 U.S. at 8, 99 S.Ct. 1551, and vacate the District Court's finding of per se tying liability under Sherman Act § 1. We remand the case for evaluation of Microsoft's tying arrangements under the rule of reason.
I'm suspect there is a substantial cohort that thinks making a much better product makes a company a monopoly.
But how do we deal with this much power ?
The bill "will facilitate innovation and consumer choice by ensuring that big tech companies cannot give preference to their own products and services over the rich diversity of competitive options offered..."
Sure that's one way of seeing a small part of the problem. But it misses so much.
A fair digital market is one thing. A viable technological society that isn't a cloaked form of fascism is another. More than "consumer choice", it's about the RIGHT to have choice - subtle difference but bear with me please.
If I exercise my moral prerogative to say "I will not use any Microsoft products because I believe they are a morally repugnant company" I may currently lose a job. Not because Microsoft are a "monopoly" but because my employer limits my choice. Or I may not get medical treatment because my local healthcare provider only gives access through a Microsoft portal. The problem subsists outside the scope of Microsoft (or Google or whomever) qua monopoly.
Where I think the European Digital Markets Act gets thing a bit more right is it's crafted within the European Interoperability Framework (an older and maybe more ambitious project).
The object isn't to weaken concentrated dominance or self-preference, but to guarantee the user has a choice including the choice NOT TO USE a technology in the case there seems to be "only one choice". An employer, health provider, payments processor or local government would have to provide alternatives or opt-outs without prejudice. That would allow genuine alternative service providers (not necessarily commercial) a foot in the door. It's a different approach that starts bottom-up instead of top-down.
ah, there it is, the ol' "i'm an expert" ploy that we were just talking about elsewhere, and then redirecting to a semantic non sequitur to divert attention away from the core issue of unfair markets. note that you can talk about the nuance of the subject without misdirecting it this way.
(the term 'monopoly' is being taken too literally here, thinking that that's cleverness, when it really indicates a positional weakness because of the revealed impulse to divert)
Which uses the term monopoly as shorthand for monopoly power, and they define as "a firm with significant and durable market power"
If you teach economics class on these subjects, then you must be familiar with the terms "horizontal integration" and "vertical integration".
Lets say 1 company has "horizontally integrated" the entire market along that horizonal. What would you call that?
Now do the same thing for "vertical integration".
Once you have thought about both of these questions, you will know why people are using the term "vertical monopoly".
And I actually don't see how cementing the Chrome engine's dominance on iOS as well as other platforms is good for the web. Because inevitably that is what will happen as just like in the IE days, websites will only work on that browser as it offers the most proprietary features. And why would you develop for multiple browsers when Chrome is available on all platforms and has such dominant market share.
People really need to be more careful with this because it could make the web less private, less secure, less driven by a spec and more beholden to Google's interests at the time.
E.g. webrtc. Safari still lags behind many things.
When you call people to be careful, you are missing the conflict apple has internally. Between the two, i choose chrome any day of the week because that's what allowed web to progress this fast
The fact that i had to/have to install an app (zoom, etc) to accept a conference call is sad.
All of these things "users don't want" are right there for use in App Store apps. They're only held back from the browser because they want you to give them 30%. In some cases they literally added features to Safari but restricted them for use in advertisements only (WebGL for one example, IIRC) because the features aren't the problem, the problem is developers accessing customers without paying 30%.
How many Apple engineers does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: None, they just declare darkness to be an innovative new feature.
I joke, but they did recently reveal that they're adding a toggle for Dark Mode in Safari:
https://www.macrumors.com/2022/03/01/safari-feature-light-da...
This is the the most important feature in when converting from a mobile app to pwa. For example, how can my applicant tracking app tell the user they have a new job candidate? How do you alert a user they have a new message on mobile without being able to use notifications? Without proper support for mobile apps from the browser, we're stuck with even more invasive native apps.
And you literally just described the inherent problem. Developers will move to the platform that gives it the most flexibility and features. Users follow. And we end up back in IE days with less diversity and less competition.
Between the two, i choose chrome any day of the week because that's what allowed web to progress this fast
I don't call that "progress" --- perhaps progress towards a Google monopoly, if you really insist. I've said it before and I'll say it again: Change is Google's weapon. They can churn the standards all they want in order to outrun competitors because only they are big enough to do that. All that "pushing the web forward" BS was merely an euphemism for Google to take control of the Internet with its gigantic army of ADHD-driven developers.
I am extremely happy when I don't have to install an app, including when video chatting (which zoom is extremely guilty of).
I don't want to give Apple a monopoly to protect me from a different monopoly. I want to give power to antitrust to protect me from all monopolies, include Apple's and Google's.
Originally the intent was they were a search company, that would pay well, and folks could donate to charities... like Mozilla. Then they decided to start their own browser, and... well here we are today.