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Comment by sushid | Hacker News Reader

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?

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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.

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