[AnthonyMouse]

> Why is the market so disfunctional that a single company has effectively swallowed all competition?

This is actually pretty common in hypercompetitive commodity markets. The largest player has a slight cost advantage due to economies of scale, so they have the best price and everyone buys from them. But they still have no market power because their market share doesn't come from barriers to entry.

> Err, yes.

It's not necessarily a monopoly even at 100% when there are competitors who could immediately enter the market if the incumbent were to be so audacious as to raise prices by 4%, or do anything else the customer even mildly dislikes -- because that fact keeps them from ever doing it.

Notice that this is not how it works for Comcast, because it's not cheap or quick to wire a city with fiber, so they can get away with a great deal of abuse before anyone else would show up to compete -- even if they only had 50% market share, as long as the other 50% is another company doing all the same abusive stuff.

> And AT&T wasn't a monopoly, since you could just walk to the person you want to talk to. Oh, wait..

To be a substitute it has to be a practical alternative that can be used for the same purpose at approximately the same cost. Having to spend an hour walking is not the same cost as picking up the phone.

[timoth3y]

> This is actually pretty common in hypercompetitive commodity markets. The largest player has a slight cost advantage due to economies of scale, so they have the best price and everyone buys from them.

This is not true at all. Looking at actual competitive commodity markets for things like lumber, oil, copper, etc, we see a lot of players in the market. I can't think of a single commodity market where there is a monopoly.

Those times in history where a monopoly has occurred in commodities markets it has been grossly abused. IAR, from the trusts of the early 1900s to the cornering of the silver market one player controlling a commodity market has not turned out well.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Looking at actual competitive commodity markets for things like lumber, oil, copper, etc, we see a lot of players in the market.

Those are all things that come from the earth (so inherently have diffuse supply), sell into the global market (so the market is large and diverse, leaving space for upstarts to find a niche) and are of strategic interest to national governments many of which then act to ensure that an independent local industry exists.

Examples of markets where this actually happens: Coca Cola (as discussed), Walmart (in local areas), YKK in zippers, AB inBev in Brazil, Luxottica in eyewear.

It's also common for this to happen with open source software, e.g. Linux on embedded devices, OpenSSH as an ssh client/server, for many years gcc as a compiler for Unix-like systems (until Apple poured money into clang to make it competitive after FSF moved gcc to GPLv3), Android on phones, etc.

[timoth3y]

> Examples of markets where this actually happens: Coca Cola (as discussed), Walmart (in local areas), YKK in zippers, AB inBev in Brazil, Luxottica in eyewear.

None of these is the result of the "slight price advantage" and increased efficiencies you claimed. Luxottica is expensive and uses their vertically integrated monopoly power to keep competitors like Oakley out. Warby Parker gained success so quickly largely because of this dysfunctional system. Coke, where it controls the market it does so by controlling distribution, menus, and retail space, not by offering cheaper products.

> It's also common for this to happen with open source software, e.g. Linux on embedded devices, OpenSSH as an ssh client/server,

These are not monopiles. They are more akin to standards. It's like saying the kilogram has a monopoly. It's kind of true if you play with the meaning of the word a bit, but in terms of markets, there is no monopoly power.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Luxottica is expensive and uses their vertically integrated monopoly power to keep competitors like Oakley out.

The eyewear market is weird because opticians use free eye exams as a loss leader to sell expensive frames, and if you have insurance then the insurance is paying and customers aren't sensitive to price, so the market selects for expensive high margin frames even though they're an inexpensive commodity with low barriers to entry. (This is a primary reason why healthcare is so expensive in general.)

The scale advantage then isn't low "price" (because the market selects for a specific high price, namely the limit on what insurance will pay), rather the advantage is lower cost which leaves the seller with more to spend on marketing etc.

And this leaves a niche for the likes of Warby Parker to capture the segment of the market which is paying out of pocket and is actually sensitive to price.

> Coke, where it controls the market it does so by controlling distribution, menus, and retail space, not by offering cheaper products.

But it still sells at competitive prices. Having retail space gives them volume, not pricing power.

> These are not monopiles. They are more akin to standards. It's like saying the kilogram has a monopoly. It's kind of true if you play with the meaning of the word a bit, but in terms of markets, there is no monopoly power.

That's the point. They have overwhelming market share but minimal market power. If suddenly Linux cost a lot of money, people would switch to BSD.

[slededit]

Strange you ignored the greatest monopoly of all time, Rockefeller's Standard Oil. Despite getting split up in 1911, its successor Exxon is the largest non-government owned oil company in the world.

[barry-cotter]

Wouldn’t have been broken up under modern American antitrust law. Prices declined consistently and quality rose as they crushed their competitors through superior expertise, quality control, research and development and economies of scale.

[sigzero]

> Why is the market so dysfunctional that a single company has effectively swallowed all competition?

Because it has the best product. That doesn't make anything dysfunctional.