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Comment by gota | Hacker News Reader

How long before the M-word starts being thrown around? In all seriousness, is it possible, likely or inevitable that Nvidia be 'broken up' due to effective monopoly?

I'm just curious, I'm ignorant about how these things go or went in the past, just young enough to not have paid attention when this was about to happen to Microsoft, and don't really have a predisposed position.

Edit: a quick wikipedia search tells me that MS was just barely spared breaking up, and had to settle with a few concessions regarding non-MS software. I can't draw a parallel from this to Nvidia, though

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

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> How long before the M-word starts being thrown around?

The US government at least mentioned "antitrust" 2 days ago, which could count depending on one's interpretation of various stages of these investigations. More discussion from more informed and opinionated people in the following thread:

"U.S. clears way for antitrust inquiries of Nvidia, Microsoft and OpenAI" (nytimes.com)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40593275

It's not clear to me how you would even go about a break up of Nvidia. They're almost unique in their success. With any other large company - Microsoft, Apple, Meta all have distinct segments of their business. Meta actually spent a huge amount of effort trying to embed their separate products in each other to avoid exactly that threat. With Nvidia, what would you even separate? They don't do the fabrication, all they do is designs and then variations on those designs for market segments. Are you going to break up their design team? I don't think it makes sense.

having a large market share because your product is superior to your competitors' is hardly anti-consumer

88% is definitely strong evidence for a monopoly position. But having a monopoly isn't illegal, only abusing a monopoly is illegal.

For example, it would be legal for AMD to sign deals with game makers to make games AMD-exclusive. But if Nvidia did that, anti-trust would likely act to prevent that.

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