Hacker News Reader

Comment by TheCoelacanth | Hacker News Reader

> You are correct - market share is not an anti-trust violation in it’s own.

I think that entire line of jurisprudence is a tragic mistake.

The wording of the law is crystal clear: "shall not monopolize", not "shall not monopolize unless it's just a really good product".

A 95% market share should not be allowed under any circumstances.

View on HN

There are a whole bunch of edge cases you aren’t thinking about. Markets can be highly local (hospital markets, eg.), firms go out of business, new products enter new markets (smart phones, tablets), even defining “the market” is hard (does Sirius XM have a meaningful “monopoly” on satellite radio?). So your “make 95% market share illegal” idea is quite challenging (actually impossible) to work out

Difficult but absolutely not impossible. There's whole domains of law dedicated to identifying and defining these kinds of fuzzy edge cases. Anyone that tells you it is impossible has malign motivations.

Hey - if you think you can do it go ahead. No one in the economics profession would oppose a usable definition of market which covered all of these cases (or even a subset of them) and made it easy.

We aren’t failing to offer definitions here bc we’re in the tank for big tech. To immediately suggest we have malign motivations isn’t charitable. It’s genuinely a hard problem.

Wouldn't fixing all those edge cases defeat the point of something simple like a 95% rule? You'd be at the point where 95% is neither necessary nor sufficient and all of those laws covering the edge cases are the real law.

You have rediscovered the American legal system, the laws that cover the ‘edge’ cases are aptly named ‘case law’

That’s what makes this whole subject so hard to argue. You can’t just be persecuted for being successful. They have to prove you’re actually preventing others from being successful. And how the do you do that without a whole bunch of wishy washy woulda coulda shoulda’s?

And I agree that it shouldn’t have been “allowed” but here we are.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com