[shadowgovt]

Worth noting whenever you read about antitrust: is the writing coming from Europe or the US.

European law grounds antitrust in whether the marketplace is harmed. In that context, something could be an antitrust violation if it's hard to compete with, even if that circumstance is better for users.

US antitrust is grounded in consumer harm. One could, hypothetically, have an ecosystem where there is one browser and it's not an antitrust situation because the benefits to consumers outweigh drawbacks to competitors (for example, if users perhaps benefit more from an ecosystem with fewer browsers than more browsers, because the odds of any given website working on their browser are higher if web devs don't have to test against dozens of bespoke partially-compliant implementations). Microsoft ran afoul of antitrust because of the consumer harm demonstrated in bundling its browser (which, notably, was a bit of a bug-ridden mess at the time) into its OS (which made the whole experience worse). But nowadays? Everyone has bundled a browser into their OS.

(None of this is to say that the US or European model is better, just that it's always important to code-switch when comprehending arguments regarding antitrust coming from the two regions).

[comex]

True, though don’t forget that the US consumer welfare standard dates only to the 70s, is rooted in judicial interpretation rather than explicit statutory wording, and has been challenged in recent years. In fact this is brought up in section 2.2.2 of the paper.

Further reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_welfare_standard