No shit. Now do Amazon, apple, meta, Microsoft, Disney and all the food conglomerates. Then it will have been a good start.
I still don’t understand how the Californian government bailed them out when they were bankrupt, yet they were allowed to remain an independent company? Why didn’t the government take full control?
Electricity in cities in the Bay Area that have their own municipal power company (like Palo Alto and Santa Clara) is literally 1/3 the cost of PG&E.
FUUUUUUUUUUUCK PG&E
Fuck them. If there was ever a case to be made for government owned utilities (and like why is that even a debate in the first place?) these assholes would be the poster child.
Because the USA haven’t had the balls to hold corporations responsible for their actions in decades. They can save them from failure, but have no willpower to correct any of their malevolent behaviors.
I really hope this generation is the one that finally changes that trend.
They are. The FTC have already brought antitrust suits against three of the companies you just listed, and you can bet your ass they’re eyeing the rest.
Decades of neoliberalism doesn’t get undone in a single day. This is good news, and if America keeps putting competent people in power we’ll see more of it.
Steam…
Edit: Funny how I was replying to a comment with examples of companies that wish they had 70% of the market under their control yet people didn’t disagree with OP but bringing up Valve? Oh man, Gaben can do no wrong! 70% of the market under the control of a company owned by a single man? No problemo!
You can’t break up steam and improve the market in any particular way. Since they’re not really big on exclusivity agreements, there’s also very little a court order would do to make the market more competitive.
If consumers were more evenly spread around different platforms there would be actual competition to determine prices and margins for the developers. Right now Epic takes a smaller share of the revenues but the price is the same to try and compensate for the smaller number of buyers. With their dominant position it’s pretty much impossible to have someone join the market and truly be competitive against Valve, even if they offered a product with all the same features and more (which would require a ridiculous amount of capital), people have their well established habits and won’t move even if the product they’re using isn’t necessarily the best or they’re spending more than they need to.
Their market dominance isn’t because of anticompetitive practices, it’s because of customer-friendly practices. People like it, so people use it.
So? A private company having control of the market is never a good thing, no matter how good they are at the moment because you never know what will happen in the future.
Majority also like Google. Like it or not, they still provide the best search engine.
Steam? Really out of all these, the the one that treats it’s customers properly and gives them any and all tools needed to make a proper purchase decision with many big sales consistently. Great call
So because they’re treating you right it’s ok to put 70% of the market in the hands of a single person?
Neither did google. The problem is that this case, from the title stated in another thread, Google are doing anti-competitive shit to make sure they maintain the dominant position. But steam does not practice in anti competitive behaviours (as far as I know anyway). In fact, the competitor can arguably be held to anti competitive behaviour depending on how you spin it.
You don’t need to have full control of the market to be considered a monopoly, you just need a big enough share that you can make it sway in the direction that you want, which Steam has. Example: Microsoft is considered a monopoly even though there’s Apple and Linux that get market shares.
I always find it funny how defensive people get when I bring this up about Steam on Lemmy of all places, suddenly people are perfectly ok with the centralization of power in the hands of a single person.
Where companies with monopolies are found to gain that title by ousting competitors and brutal buyouts and tactics literally every time, Valve exists. Literally. They just exist. Big difference between a monopoly and the best.
Other companies also exist. In fact there are several launchers and two other digital distributors, and several websites, where one can purchase games. There are some things Steam is shit on. The still feels old interface as a broad example. Competitors could push in, like Epic. Instead, they manage to create the next step up from a gold-tainted dung pile, shit on their own launcher or store stability and performance, and create an experience so bad that Steam is able, through the fuckups of their rivals, maintain a market majority.
Huh.
Maybe it’s just the games I play, but I mostly hear people in MMO’s ranting about steam and swearing they’ll never use it (or never use it again). At least some of these people have seemingly zero personal issues with Amazon gaming, arc, epic, gog, and a few other steam clones.
I realize that by the numbers, steam is probably still the biggest, but unlike that early half-life debacle, most games are on multiple platforms now. Steam being bigger isn’t what I’d call monopolistic anymore, it’s just good sales on games and inertia.
Given epic’s often BETTER sales, despite the fact that I really dislike the layout and functionality of the epic client, most of what steam has going for it is the deck and inertia.
I agree, sort of. People may be right to point out that it’s not only about a dominant position but also about abusing that market power to lock people in. Still I think our entire platform-economy is a little problematic. People want one-stop-shopping because it’s really convenient, and people tend to go to platforms where others already are. So most people stick with Steam, Spotify, Uber, Whatsapp, etc. I don’t think this has to be a problem, if indeed these platform are in a way neutral, free, not abusing their power. Sometimes these platforms already behave in responsible manner, but there really is no guarantee that this will stay that way. Everything with a dominant position can be enshittified, including Steam. What we need are FOSS decentralized platforms! Platforms where everyone comes together are so important, that they shouldn’t be left to for-profit companies, people should come together in public squares.
Thing is we can’t know for sure they’re not abusing their power… Oh wait, we can in fact!
Game price is based on wanting a return on investment after a certain number of sales, the amount of money needed to make a profit is based on the development cost, every time someone in the distribution chain takes a cut the price increases. Valve takes a 30% cut and that’s enough to have made their owner a billionaire, those billions come from money you and me and all other Steam users spent that we didn’t need to.
It’s the same logic as in any other market, the only difference is that other companies are trading publically so people get angry because their numbers are public and we can easily see that they’re making billions in profit off of us to enrich investors, well with Valve there’s only one investor.
And again, do we need to wait until they start acting in truly awful ways before we act on the fact that they control a majority of the market and are trying to increase their market dominance? Newell could die tomorrow and the company could then be made public and turn to shit, what then? “Dang, we should have done something while we had the chance I guess…”???
SHHHH!!!
Monopolies and authoritarians aren’t bad as long as people like them! Hadn’t you heard?
This is a big deal, but just a reminder that this is the District (trial) court, so the next step would be the Circuit Court of Appeals, followed by an appeal to the Supreme Court. There may be some intriguing injunctions that come out of this, but we’re years away from a final disposition.
For the curious, this one came out of the DC Circuit, informally known to be the most technically and administratively savvy circuit, as it deals with a LOT of nitty gritty stuff coming out of Federal agencies.
I was about to comment that this is going to be appealed, and unless something changes with SCOTUS, my money is in it being reversed to some degree.
this is why it’s silly that people are mad at mozilla for buying a privacy friendly ad company to try and break the monopoly.
Its seriously absurd. I hate ads, but there’s realistically not a better option to profit when providing free software and services like Mozilla is doing. Investing into ads that don’t violate your privacy is a great decision. I don’t know what the hell people want from them.
They should do it like Signal: accept donations. Signal is doing just fine. But Mozilla cannot legally do that as they are a for-profit company. And Mozilla Foundation won’t do that either because they are funded by Mozilla and under their command.
You can accept donations if you’re a for-profit company, there’s no rule against that.
You underestimate the complexity of a web browser if you compare it to instant messaging app
People don’t seem to realise that developing a browser (a real one, not Chrome with a different paint job), web rendering engine, having the top-notch security expertise that building a modern web engine requires, plus being on the board that decides web standards is expensive.
It’s honestly at a similar scale and complexity to OS development.
We’re talking hundreds of millions a year to do the work that Mozilla needs to do. People who say “oh I’d chip in a dollar or two, but only if they get rid of all other funding” as if it’s feasible kind of get on my nerves because they clearly don’t see the big picture.
Any time Mozilla tries to diversify their income while still being broadly privacy-respecting they’re branded as evil or too corporate. Any time they ask for donations they’re being greedy beggars. When they take Google’s money they’re shills for big tech. They can’t win. People want Mozilla to work for free.
In a healthy market new browsers need to be able to enter… but browsers are so complex from the reckless, endless feature creep that creating a new browser securely (or at all) is unreasonable. (Luckily they are open source and can be forked but the changes are minor compared to the base. A Chromium fork is still Chromium at the end of the day).
Supporting the ad-driven internet is contrary to what is wanted by many users of Firefox/flavors and there is no alternative. It was said that they would destroy the Sith, not join them.
Supporting the ad-driven internet
The thing is that there’s not really a good alternative. There’s real costs in running a service - servers, bandwidth, staff, etc. Either you pay for content directly (subscription services), someone else pays for you (which is the case with many Lemmy servers where admins are paying out of their own pockets), or ads cover the cost for you. People want to use the web for free, so ad-supported content is going to be around for a long time.
I would rather pay for works directly, so I prefer a browser with no ads ever.
I disliked adverts so much as a time waster of limited human life. There may not be a good alternative to dumping toxic waste into a river, for example, but I still think we shouldn’t do it.
Can’t speak for others but I do donate (not as much as I’d like) to Wikipedia and buy merch from some creators (if I like it for what it is).
FUCK YEAH!!! NOW BREAK THOSE BASTARDS UP!!!
Fine: About $3.50
Punitive damages: lol
