1250
US Court Rules Google a Monopoly in 'Biggest Antitrust Case of the 21st Century'.
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
1250 points (99.2% liked)
Technology
59569 readers
3431 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
It's not about market share, it's about actually using that market share to negatively impact competition. Steam doesn't have any sort of exclusivity agreements with anyone, nor do they get paid if a customer buys a key on another platform or on the dev's own website. There's no anti-competitive behavior here at all, people use Steam because they like the experience more.
There's a massive difference between anti-competitive behavior and just being a really good option. You don't get broken up because you're successful, you get broken up because you're abusing your dominant market position. I have yet to see any evidence that Valve does this.
Game pricing is still based on then taking a 30% cut so it's negatively impacting consumers because that's billions in profit that they make and with their dominance they don't need to actively take anti competitive measures, they're the default choice.
It's like Walmart, they don't need to actively push mom and pop shops out of the way, they just need to open their doors and wait them out. In theory all they did was offer something great (everything you want in the same place!) but the end result is competition closing their doors.
And we shouldn't be shutting down/breakup up either if that's all they're doing. Being successful isn't a crime.
Walmart has had multiple cases of predatory pricing accusations and has completely pulled out of Germany due to it. Criticism of Valve is: their service is too good? I'm really not seeing the anti-trust w/ Valve (here's a related Wikipedia article for Valve), but I am seeing it for Walmart.