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by 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 659 days ago
They are saying "Steam is a monopoly because they're so big", you are saying "Steam is not a monopoly because they're not anti-competitive", you're not disagreeing
1 comments

I am saying it’s not a monopoly at all because it’s a) not the only player in the PC games store market and b) has no mechanism in place to be able to enforce such a position even if it was.
You can go back in history and apply that logic to any company and claim they weren't monopolies as a result. Standard oil and AT&T had plenty of competitors, none were able to grow beyond extremely small scale.
The key question is whether an antitrust target is engaging in uncompetitive practices. I haven't noticed any claims of Steam/Valve using uncompetitive practices (but I could have simply missed them.)
Whether something is a monopoly and whether they've abused it in such a way that they should be struck with an antitrust suit are two different things. I don't think many would argue that Steam abused its monopoly.
Except Steam is neither.
Making comparisons across industries & time periods is not going to work well, especially at a superficial level.