[Xelbair]

Sure, but in non-digital markets we had a term for most common growth hacking tactics for attaining that niche monopoly.

Dumping. Operating on loss for years, just burning money to capture a market and then jack up prices and make competition unfeasible.

Which is illegal in most cases when it comes to physical goods. of course it depends on the region you're in - it is extremely illegal with sky high fines in my country for example.

Having the attitude to reach that goal is fine, but the goal itself(monopoly over segment of a market) should be impossible to reach. Whenever it happens markets get distorted to the detriment of all customers.

The whole point of capitalism is to put stress onto system for self-improvement - you need to produce better good, make it more efficient and cheaper, and find perfect balance between price and performance - to run economy as efficiently as possible while basically 'crowdsourcing' resource allocation computation over every market participant.

As soon as that stress is gone, you're back to Guilds system where nothing is dictated by market forces, just at whim of current entity in power.

[Digit-Al]

I remember many (many) years ago I used to frequent a small independent video rental shop. Then, one day a Blockbuster opened next door (and when I say next door, I do mean literally next door) offering a larger range of videos to rent and much cheaper prices. Within about three months the independent had gone out of business and shut down, at which point the Blockbuster jacked their prices up to what the independent had been charging.

It was incredibly blatant and I felt sorry for the poor guy that had been running the independent business.

[amelius]

If companies are like processes then we need an OOM-killer for monopolies.

[yujzgzc]

The analogy with dumping is interesting. In the software world, near-zero marginal costs make it much harder to determine, but I guess the same concept does exist.