• nora@slrpnk.net
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    1 year ago

    What’s a natural monopoly? Valve currently has the freedom to implement anything they want within an extent because they’re so popular. If they decided they wanted to charge devs 35% would people stop using it? Probably not. Steam’s monopoly is as bad as any other for the same reason any other monopoly is bad.

    • coltorl@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      A natural monopoly is when an industry is difficult to break into, making competition difficult or impossible. This favors incumbents, in fact, a lot of industries are natural monopolies (pharma, aerospace, chip production).

      The difficulty of breaking into an industry may be because:

      • new players cannot compete with established scale
      • start up costs require a nearly all-or-nothing approach, high risk
      • regulations tie the hand of new innovators
    • SnipingNinja@slrpnk.net
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      1 year ago

      Look it up? It’s an actual term, not something I made up for whatever reason you assumed to argue against something I didn’t even say. I already said it’s still not a good thing, it just would have happened regardless of whoever that was able to do it on scale first.

    • stillwater@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      You may want to read up on Ma Bell or Microsoft’s legal issues with Internet Explorer in the 90s to see what specifically was so bad about monopolies like those, and then revisit this idea.