I don't like what Nvidia has done to gamers but they're not really a monopoly just because AMD and Intel were too busy tripping over their shoelaces and Jensen Huang built a well oiled machine that outcompeted everyone else.
I don't like what Nvidia has done to gamers but they're not really a monopoly just because AMD and Intel were too busy tripping over their shoelaces and Jensen Huang built a well oiled machine that outcompeted everyone else.
Nvidia is a monopoly in the sense there is no competition, but unlike monopolies that are illegal this one came about as a result of the rest of the market simply not bothering to play while they kept pressing on.
Succeeding so hard by legitimately outcompeting every other fucking bastard in sight shouldn't mean getting slapped with antitrust.
It's a bummer when the chosen line of argument is this straw man victimhood a la Atlas Shrugged.
And there's the million (trillion?) dollar question: What is Nvidia doing to stop others from competing? No, "their product is too good" (which they are) is not a valid argument.
If you argue Nvidia is deliberately not producing as many GPUs to keep prices high, first you'll have to see if they're just not getting bottlenecked by TSMC and second you will also have to bring in AMD and possibly Intel along for price fixing which by definition isn't a monopoly.
Locking down CUDA for one.
Exclusive or privileged contracts regarding supply could be the lowest hanging fruit here.
Has nothing to do with the market simply choosing Nvidia if that's the criteria. The antitrust violation wouldn't look at that at all.
but I agree in that it makes it hard to do normal business. smaller businesses do all these anticompetitive things and its the most rational thing to do. when does it flip to being sanctionable? when does it move away from "hey you didn't maximize shareholder value so you're the problem and a judge will agree" to "hey, now you maximized shareholder value and the government thinks you're the problem and a judge will agree"
But the trillion dollar question is whether they are abusing that monopoly: which are behaviors like tying, price discrimination, exclusive dealing, etc.
It's a modern day Tesla in waiting more than likely.