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Whenever I see a comparison to Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior, I wonder whether people don't understand antitrust law, what Microsoft did, or both. From a competition point of view, antitrust isn't concerned about where you are, but rather how you got there. As Sherman put it: "[a person] who merely by superior skill and intelligence...got the whole business because nobody could do it as well as he could was not a monopolist" As far as we know, Google is doing nothing to prevent other companies, like Apple or Microsoft from making similar acquisitions and/or capitalising on the acquisitions they have made. Microsoft told OEMs that if they sold more than X computers without Windows, their licensing cost would go up by Y. There's also their embrace, extend and extinguish (their own words) which describes their strategy to adopt a standard (Java), add custom behavior (J/Direct) and thus breaking the standard and weakening the product. And this isn't all of it, and they also did some stupid stuff in court (submitting faked videos and getting caught). As long as Google's behavior doesn't hurt consumers nor does it unfairly disadvantage competition (and being too good and too big isn't enough, they need to actively undermine them), the comparison is absolutely and totally flawed. |
This sounds very strange to me given the fact that by definition a monopoly is the control of a market by one entity, it doesn't have anything to do with how it gets there.