Anti-trust lawsuits don't require an absolute monopoly. It requires proving that a company behaved anti-competitively.
> The lawsuit said Google had “corrupted legitimate competition in the ad tech industry by engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of the wide swath of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers and brokers to facilitate digital advertising.”
> Anti-trust lawsuits don't require an absolute monopoly. It requires proving that a company behaved anti-competitively.
Indeed, the original purpose of anti-trust laws was to prevent trusts and cartels--multiple companies collectively fixing prices and ensuring that no new entrants can compete.
> Anti-trust lawsuits don't require an absolute monopoly. It requires proving that a company behaved anti-competitively
Also, having a monopoly (even an absolution monopoly) does not automatically mean you are violating antitrust law. You had to do something anti-competitive to get that monopoly or be doing something anti-competitive to maintain it.
The easiest way to think about it is that US antitrust law is about preventing monopolization, not about preventing monopolies.
Epic Games is still fighting their antitrust case against Apple so the federal government isn’t going to swoop in and take over the case. If Epic truly fails and DOJ doesn’t see it as a favorable outcome, they might further explore antitrust litigation.
I've never understood this kind of "regulators should ignore evidence of wrongdoing as long as there is also evidence of someone else engaging in wrongdoing" thinking. Even granting that Apple is super-mega-unbearably evil, do you really think regulators should serialize investigations and actions, only moving on to the #2 worst offender once the #1 is sorted?
>do you really think regulators should serialize investigations and actions, only moving on to the #2 worst offender once the #1 is sorted?
Actually, yes. Because if they take down the #2 worst offender, that leaves #1 as the default option for consumers, and strengthens #1's position at #2's expense. It makes the problem even worse than before.
As a consumer who doesn't want to use Apple devices, and uses Google because that's basically the only other option for many things, anything that greatly harms Google harms me. Take down Apple and create more competition, and then I'll have more options and I'll be able to maybe choose some things other than Google. After Apple is broken apart, then Google becomes the #1 problem, so go after them at that time. (Yes, I know this particular case probably won't have that much effect on Google.)
According to a quick google search, iOS has almost 60% marketshare in the US. Many other top-GDP nations are similar.
A bunch of people in India using Android isn't much help when you're in a country where most people use Apple.
By your logic, most monopolies shouldn't be investigated or regulated at all, because most people on the entire planet don't use their products. One airline is fine, because most humans don't ever fly. One car company is fine, because most humans don't have cars. Etc.
Meta is cited in the complaint [1]. Google and Facebook realized there was a risk they could each cannibalize the others' margins if they both had to compete in a market with many players. They made a deal to avoid that.
The relevant part is around paragraph 187, under the "Google Further Stunts Header Bidding by Working to Bring
Facebook and Amazon into Its Open Bidding Fold" header.
Maybe relevant disclosure: I used to work for a company that was a launch partner of Facebook's Audience Network [2]. In a separate lawsuit in 2020, some state attorneys general claimed that Facebook's internal communications showed that FAN was just a smokescreen to get Facebook leverage to make a deal with Google. Oops, silly us.
> Can someone explain how Google has a monopoly when there are competitors in their league?
Being a monopoly doesn’t mean you have no competitors - it means you have enough control of the market to artificially affect/set the market price for something (ie that there was not enough competition for efficient pricing).
I think in the case of Apple it's more difficult to challenge due to the existence of Android. iOS doesn't even have 50% of the market mobile OS market share globally. You can argue Apple has a monopoly on their own products, but then we'd need to also discuss the same for Xbox, Playstation, Nintendo, and any other device that has its own marketplace.
I'm not sure about the stats on gaming consoles, but Apple has over 50% marketshare in the US last I checked, and we're talking about US law here so US marketshare is really more important than how many Android phones people in India and China have. So having a majority of the market which almost everyone these days buys from (almost everyone has a smartphone now, not like gaming consoles which are a niche market), and then forcing everyone with an iDevice to use the Apple App store, is a clear monopoly unlike some gaming console that a small single-digit percentage of the population (or less) owns, and competes with 2 other big competitors, is not the same.
It is not just about AppStore fees but also about the fact that you are forbidden to use any other store to buy/download apps from and you are forbidden use any 3rd-partty payment processor for payments inside your app. They force you to use their systems with 30% cut. That feels anti-competitive quite a lot!
The critical thing here is how you define "market". Some people say that iPhones are a market, therefore Apple is a monopoly. Some people (like Apple) say that mobile devices are market, and Apple has like 30% market share.
You would have to show that that apple has colluded with other app stores to maintain a 30% fee. Otherwise, they charge the fee, and a competitor is free to attract developers with a lower fee, which is competition.
You could argue that apple abused their market position to administer the fee. Or you could argue that they are entitled to charge the fee and consumers are free to leave the platform. It's a grey area.
To be fair, and I don't agree with this, the word monopoly appears in the complaint 66 times. The NYT is reporting the story, but the FTC is the one "misusing" the word.
I'm just trying to help out here. I don't disagree with you, but it gets tiring that every single time some market position is abused, and the word "monopoly" gets used, there is at least one pedantic getting hung up on the "mono" part.
Android/iOS market share? Duopoly really. Call it a monopoly? "How is it a monopoly when..."
What they mean. What is always meant, is, you have a market position so significant, that you can use to get an unfair advantage on competition. That's what this is about, that is what all of these usually are about.
But, it gets sidetracked by misuse of words that should be understood from context.
Antitrust, isn't exclusively about monopolies abusing their market position. It doesn't care that much about whether it is one actor abusing it's position, or if it's two... Or three.
But this new paradigm of antitrust isn’t about if there’s one two or three of something. It’s a more complex form of antitrust.
The Amazon antitrust paradox is about how they aren’t a market leader in tons of their product categories but that they can cross leverage advantages between product categories and verticals to create anticompetitiveness. It’s an analysis of the internal structure of the business, not if they have competition in a narrow subset of outcomes.
Monopoly is being used as a substitute for the words bad actor or predatory not duopoly etc. IMHO it’s sloppiness and jargon to invoke emotion, and I’d prefer they used more precise words.
I am saying the word monopoly IS being misused, but I am not arguing that it is because its actually a duopoly, but it is being used as a substitute word in places better words belong.
Google owns 90%+ of search, Android, and the Ad side. The three together allow it to crush competitors from both ends all while taking a 35% cut. The most lucrative part of the ad business is paid downloads. how many of those searches start in Google with e.g. "Download Spotify". Google makes money selling that to Spotify and they can do it at a much higher rate because no other ad seller has access to search inventory for "download Spotify" or similar searches.
> no other ad seller has access to search inventory for "download Spotify”
I think that behavior should be broadly illegal on the basis that it’s tantamount to false advertising and extortion.
Google claims to be a search engine; if you search for something very specific and well known like Spotify, providing you a paid advertisement as the top hit is essentially fraud.
> The lawsuit said Google had “corrupted legitimate competition in the ad tech industry by engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of the wide swath of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers and brokers to facilitate digital advertising.”