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Comment by treis | Hacker News Reader

You're not supposed to be able to use dominance in one market (git hosting) to gain dominance in another (AI powered code suggestions).

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You might be confused but that's literally what you do as a business. You leverage your domain area expertise to expand into new areas of business.

For instance, Apple already knew about the portable hardware market and extended their reach into the portable music market via iPod. It used the iPod to reach the music marketplace via iTunes. Used its market dominance to create iPhone and the rest is history.

Maybe that's a personal maxim on your part but there's no law that says if you have dominance (what does that even mean?) in one market you cannot enter another. Think about what you're saying. We'd have no multi-product company if that were the case. What does "dominance" or "market" mean anyway?

That's what you do when you are not at-risk of being a monopoly in a sector. Apple could do these things back then because they were still a relatively small company in the tech sector. But now a days things do start to get more complicated.

As you point out, establishing what dominance is in a market is a tricky thing and it is why governments will investigate any potential signs of it. Now, personally I don't think this is really an issue for Github, or microsoft (the parent company) but let's not pretend market dominance and abuse of dominant position are not a real things.

>You might be confused but that's literally what you do as a business. You leverage your domain area expertise to expand into new areas of business.

>or instance, Apple already knew about the portable hardware market and extended their reach into the portable music market via iPod. It used the iPod to reach the music marketplace via iTunes. Used its market dominance to create iPhone and the rest is history.

Look at what you're saying here. Apple had domain experience in hardware and launched a new product (good). Then it used the dominance of that product to muscle into an entirely different market (bad). And the combination of hardware and market has led to Apple being able to extract their tax on half the music market, or whatever they have.

This is exactly what we don't want and why anti-trust laws exist.

I think the parent comment is referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_(commerce).

TLDR: If you have a monopoly in a market, you can't use your position to get a heads up in another distinct market by bundling products together. Ex: Microsoft can't use their monopoly position in the OS market to get an advantage in browsers by bundling IE with Windows.

It's my understanding that this doesn't apply if you don't have a monopoly, and it also doesn't apply unless you're actually bundling the sale of multiple things together.

Doesn't seem to be relevant here IMO.

"git hosting" is too narrow a market. Code repository may be someone interested in, there Github won't have a practical dominance. Most probably by nature of complete Github, it will come under "software development tools"

That might be true, if GiHub were a monopoly. But they are not.

In the same vein that Google are not a monopoly in search, Microsoft are not a monopoly in consumer and business OSes, Chrome is monopoly in browsers, etc.

Just because there is some existing competition which has a few percent marketshare and technically it's not a monopoly doesn't materially change anything besides a pro forma excuse. Which is why Google have been propping up Mozilla, they want the excuse "but technically there's another browser". However for consumers and the market it doesn't matter that technically there's an option that practically nobody uses.

a lot of people confuse popular with monopoly.

And even more know that you don't need to be a monopoly to violate anti-trust laws.

What do you mean "You're not supposed to"? Is there some law that forbids this? From my (potentially naive) POV this seems to be roughly equivalent to asking physics professors to stay away from mathematics since they are likely to have some relevant cross-domain expertise.

> Is there some law that forbids this?

Yes. It's called the Sherman Act, and it's the basis of anti-trust enforcement in the US.

https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

<<<The Sherman Act outlaws "every contract, combination, or conspiracy in restraint of trade," and any "monopolization, attempted monopolization, or conspiracy or combination to monopolize." >>>

I know lots of people here don't like it, but it is the law and that was the question; "this" in parent clearly meant "use dominance in one market to gain dominance in another" in grandparent, regardless of whether that's actually the central issue here or not.

Microsoft has been nailed for this exact kind of thing in the past. This isn't hypothetical.

it only runs afowl of antitrust laws if it solidifies an unfair monopoly and/or uses market position as a monopoly holder to prevent fair competition from emerging.

most monopolies are completely legal. small town with only one gas station or one grocery store? 100% monopoly, 100% legal.

there are plenty of alternatives to github, paid, free, as a service, and self-hosted. GitHub has a large market share, but no monopoly.

This would, of course, need to be determined in court. Microsoft argued it had plenty of competition when the DOJ came for it over Windows and bundling. Like I said, this isn't unexplored territory for Microsoft. This is the company of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish and the Halloween documents.

This isn't a company with plenty of goodwill in its sails launching a hip new product. They're not Do No Evil era Google or Apple riding high on the iPod. We can't just pretend there isn't a history.

Microsoft got done because they were threatening vendors with punitive action if they didn't bundle Windows and IE by default.

Which is to say: Microsoft was taking specific action which wasn't a natural consequence of their software, but was being actively enforced to keep out competition. Vendors didn't organically discover consumers weren't interested in getting a PC without Windows and IE, they were prevented from even offering the option lest they be completely denied the ability to offer that at all.

yep. people forget this (including me)

you're making a big assumption here, that Microsoft did not learn from their mistakes.

I posit that they have indeed learned from their mistakes.

1) They train Copilot with repos hosted on github.com. 2) Users who upload code to github.com grant GitHub an explicit license[0] granting GitHub the right to show that code to others. 3) GitHub do not specify which technologies or techniques they may use to show this code to others, meaning they may use any technique they like.

Microsoft have learned. And they have covered their collective asses. Users who host code on github.com agreed to these terms.

Users who don't like their code showing up in Copilot should not be hosting their code on GitHub, because they agreed to have their code delivered to others when they signed up.

[0]: https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...

From the linked terms of service:

> This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell Your Content. It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use Your Content outside of our provision of the Service[...]

I imagine the crux of this case will be what constitutes "the Service", and whether that includes Copilot. Also whether licensing Copilot counts as selling Your Content.

GitHub provides the code free of charge, you pay for the GPU time to train the AI model, I would assume, since that is what costs GitHub money.

Github likely does have what would be considered a monopoly marketshare, and strong network effects now keep the other competitors from breaking out.

"Github likely does have what would be considered a monopoly marketshare"

Citation needed. I'm interested to know of examples of how they have stifled competitors. AFAIK Gitlab came of age well after Github had already grown super-large. If Github could have killed Gitlab, wouldn't they have done so?

"GitHub has around 56 million users, whereas GitLab has over 31 million users." - https://radixweb.com/blog/github-vs-gitlab

That is also excluding Azure, Bitbucket, AWS and the plethora of other git repository hosting companies and services. AFAIK, gitlab has more payed (AKA, private or premium) customers than does Github (though I lack a citation there, but that was my understanding when researching this a couple years ago on where to host a private companies code. My take-away then was that Gitlab is actually more popular amongst private companies and Github is more popular for open source projects).

What would be considered Monopoly marketshare? I would suggest that Facebook, Twitter and Amazon have monopolies. If you get shut down as an Amazon seller, that can be 90% of your revenue. Given so many people can leave, and have left Github voluntarily, is implicit evidence that there are very decent alternatives (if not, there would be no alternative and you would be forced to stay with Github for lack of alternatives. That is not the case though, it's easy to just go over to Gitlab. From my perspective, I have no idea how Github can kill Gitlab, I'm curious if there is a vector where Github could use it's network effects to diminish Gitlab, as a specific example. So, how could Github do that?)

maybe, but it is only an illegal monopoly if they are using their monopoly position to prevent others from entering the market.

they are not threatening to block access to github.com for all Comcast users if Comcast chooses not to block access to gitlab.com, for example. That would be an illegal activity for a monopoly. simply existing as a monopoly is not itself illegal.

Yeah, it isn't illegal to be a monopoly, but being one can restrict practices like bundling.

Microsoft used its OS dominance to... solidify its OS dominance?

Does the law really say you can't include a free web browser if someone else created a paid one?

I don't want to live in a world where potential improvements for consumers get companies sued for antitrust.

I highly recommend looking into the history if this really is new to you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

Yes, this is the basis of antitrust law

But who gets to draw the lines? Why can't both of these be in a single market "tools for programmers"?

In what sense? Certainly not my understanding of us antitrust law.

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