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US Court Rules Google a Monopoly in 'Biggest Antitrust Case of the 21st Century'.
(www.commondreams.org)
this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
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Technology
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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..."???