| > You've twisted the argument to be about DRM. That's a completely separate issue. The only people to blame for DRM are the people who use it on their content, not the platforms that are forced to implement it. The people to blame for DRM are the legislators who created laws allowing DRM to be used for anti-competitive lock-in, which is its primary purpose. > The _cause_ of monopolies are successful businesses. That doesn't track. Costco is a successful business, does it have a monopoly? Starbucks? Honda? Dell? McDonald's? Adidas? > If I invent some cool thing and I'm the only person in the world doing it, I have a monopoly - good for me. If I can deliver a product better than everybody else, and everybody else chooses to not compete with me any more, also good for me. The only time this happens for a non-trivial period of time in the absence of anti-competitive practices or regulations is for so-called natural monopolies. Otherwise there would be low barriers to entry and correspondingly someone else wanting to make some money by entering the market. And even natural monopolies are extremely narrow. They tend to get drawn with thick lines because whoever holds the natural monopoly will be trying to tie all kinds of other services to it through vertical integration, e.g. the natural monopoly is "roadside fiber conduit" rather than "internet service" no matter how much the utility company wants to insist that you should have to buy internet service from the company that digs the trench or installs the utility poles. > Predatory pricing or agreements that restrict who can use your product, or what others can do. Oh, you meant predatory pricing in terms of dumping rather than charging monopoly rents. The problem is that's basically not a thing for digital goods because dumping is selling below the marginal cost and the marginal cost for digital goods is zero. And corporations are sneaky. To reiterate the DRM point, what Google does with remote attestation is extremely nefarious, not least because it's simultaneously subtle and effective. What they do is, provide remote attestation services to third parties for Google-approved devices. Then things like bank apps require them, even though they provide no real benefit, because they're marketed as providing "security" and risk-averse bank managers don't want to be seen not using a hypothetical security feature. But now anyone who wants to make a competing device that isn't approved by Google can't pass attestation and therefore can't get customers because customers expect their bank app to work. Then it's the banks rather than Google requiring you to use a Google-approved Android device and Google will claim they didn't require anything even though Google providing that otherwise-useless feature has in reality created a large anti-competitive barrier for anyone trying to make a competing device without Google's approval. |
Gmail is free, Docs is free, Maps is free, lots of google apps are free. This makes it very difficult few a new player to enter the market. This is predatory pricing.
Nothing else you said is really relevant to the forced sale of Chrome.