• ancap shark@lemmy.today
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    9 months ago

    I don’t like to argue semantics on the internet so I won’t answer further than this

    US Department of Justice alleges Apple to be a monopoly

    With all due respect, I really don’t care what the US government calls a monopoly. It doesn’t make it a monopoly just because some county government said so.

    Single seller: In a monopoly, there is one seller of the good, who produces all the output.[6] Therefore, the whole market is being served by a single company, and for practical purposes, the company is the same as the industry.

    That’s the most important thing. We agree on that one. A monopoly is the singular provider of a good in the market. Github is not the only provider of git hosting (think Gitlab and Bitbucket). Apple is not the singular provider of smartphones (Sansung, Motorola, Xiaomi, etc), nor it’s the singular provider of laptops (Lenovo, Samsung, Alienware, Framework). All of the other points are things that monopolies do, but alone doesn’t make a monopoly.

    This difference is important, because creating a true monopoly is impossibly hard. So hard in fact, that they are usually caused by interference of the government (like Petrobrás here), not the other way around.