A monopoly is holding a large marketshare. It is a label determined by courts. That the marketshare is from consumers picking the product is irrelevant to being declared a monopoly.
In the late 90’s Windows was the overwhelming market leader for OS’s because the alternatives weren’t good. Linux didn’t have good consumer focused distros and was therefore used on servers. MacOS at the time was still cooperatively multitasked like Windows 1.0 from almost 20 years earlier. So Microsoft was declared a monopoly and had restrictions placed on what it could do despite all other competitors already doing what Microsoft did (like including a web browser). That’s why years later Apple was able to make Safari the ONLY web browser (all “alternatives” were just reskins of Safari) whereas Microsoft was forced to include support so that you could switch the default web browser.
Microsoft was not declared a monopolist because of their dominant market position in operating system space.
They were declared a monopolist because they used that market position to actively disincentive the use of competitor’s browsers, beyond “just including a browser”, but actively doing things to make other browsers difficult to download and use on their operating system.
Apple is not declared a monopolist because they do not own and control chrome, the really dominant market player derived from WebKit, and apple are not using some dominant market position to enforce that.
If you see things differently and think the same logic as these cases could be applied to steam, go ahead and contact epic’s legal department.
A monopoly is holding a large marketshare. It is a label determined by courts. That the marketshare is from consumers picking the product is irrelevant to being declared a monopoly.
In the late 90’s Windows was the overwhelming market leader for OS’s because the alternatives weren’t good. Linux didn’t have good consumer focused distros and was therefore used on servers. MacOS at the time was still cooperatively multitasked like Windows 1.0 from almost 20 years earlier. So Microsoft was declared a monopoly and had restrictions placed on what it could do despite all other competitors already doing what Microsoft did (like including a web browser). That’s why years later Apple was able to make Safari the ONLY web browser (all “alternatives” were just reskins of Safari) whereas Microsoft was forced to include support so that you could switch the default web browser.
Microsoft was not declared a monopolist because of their dominant market position in operating system space.
They were declared a monopolist because they used that market position to actively disincentive the use of competitor’s browsers, beyond “just including a browser”, but actively doing things to make other browsers difficult to download and use on their operating system.
Apple is not declared a monopolist because they do not own and control chrome, the really dominant market player derived from WebKit, and apple are not using some dominant market position to enforce that.
If you see things differently and think the same logic as these cases could be applied to steam, go ahead and contact epic’s legal department.