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Fades ,

FUCK YEAH!!! NOW BREAK THOSE BASTARDS UP!!!

Bob_Robertson_IX ,

Will this mean that no one will be able to pay to be the default search, or just that Google will no longer be allowed?

Honestly, Google is still the best free search even though it isn’t as good as it used to be… and if this ruling means that no one can pay to be the default then Google will still win based on name recognition and performance. Plus they will save money by not needing to give it to Apple.

The real loser here is Apple who is going to lose a fairly large revenue stream.

TheGalacticVoid ,

I imagine that, if regulators go hard enough, it’ll make sweeping changes company-wide. Google does a lot of anti-competitive behaviors that don’t involve money and are very sneaky, and as a result, we might see a lot of features be changed in the long term.

chiliedogg ,

I think this may also end up killing their deal with reddit.

HubertManne ,

we have so many freaking monopolies now a days. we really need to keep companies from owning so much. bring back the media limits and no company should be able to own multiple areas of healthcare and such.

Eldritch ,

Biggest “so far” they’re far from the only.

anticurrent , (edited )

Mark my words! the outcome of this will be like a mountain giving birth to a mouse.

Microsoft came out of such antitrust lawsuit unscathed and a decade later went back to pushing its browser down everyone’s throat.

WoahWoah ,

A mountain giving birth to a mouse? Is that a translation from another language? I’m not being critical, it’s just oddly specific and bizarre.

cupcakezealot ,
@cupcakezealot@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

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.

priapus ,

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.

doodledup ,

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.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

You can accept donations if you’re a for-profit company, there’s no rule against that.

Laborer3652 ,

Signal is a teeny tiny little pet project compared to an entire browser and rendering engine.

Feathercrown ,

They want them to meet all of their impossibly high and contradictory standards at the same time. For free. What’s so hard about that?? /s

gnuplusmatt ,

I don’t know what the hell people want from them.

these people are probably already using forks anyway

Tregetour ,
@Tregetour@lemdro.id avatar

Not silly at all. It’s a ship of Theseus situation, and the ship has helmsmen with bad attitudes. Bad attitudes engender bad decisionmaking.

wjrii ,

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.

dohpaz42 ,
@dohpaz42@lemmy.world avatar

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.

Lost_My_Mind ,

Stop making me sad, sir!!!

adarza ,

depends on when it hits the supreme court.

didn’t someone just say google was ‘very bad’ and should be ‘shut down’? …someone that helped stack the court to its current composition?

Stegget ,

Clone Teddy Roosevelt.

DaddleDew ,

No shit. Now do Amazon, apple, meta, Microsoft, Disney and all the food conglomerates. Then it will have been a good start.

disguy_ovahea ,

Walmart and telecom too.

Ragnarok314159 ,

Too big to fail financial industry should go first.

sunzu ,

oil, pharma... most of all critical aspects of every day life is controlled by oligopolies

cranakis ,

They’ve got Amazon in the works

Amazon

BossDj ,

Would be nice if we didn’t let them kill off so many other businesses first before doing something about it.

Kecessa , (edited )

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!

Feathercrown ,

Steam isn’t actually a monopoly in a meaningful way

bitfucker ,

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.

Kecessa , (edited )

Steam is currently being sued for anti competitive practices and do we really need to wait until they do bad shit before we start to consider that a single company having a good on 70% of the market isn’t a good thing?

NotMyOldRedditName ,

Isn’t that only about the 30% fee?

Steam provides a lot of value for that 30% fee, more than Apple does.

Kecessa ,

Nope, about including price fixing clauses.

The 30% fee is another issue entirely.

NotMyOldRedditName ,

Ah, gotcha. Thanks.

R00bot ,
@R00bot@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

Wtf is with people deciding a monopoly is good because the company hasn’t started enshittifying it yet. It will happen. It’s what monopolies do. Healthy competition is an important part of preventing enshittification.

Kecessa ,

The day Newell leaves people will be eating their words.

JamesFire ,

Steam has no competitors because nobody is competing with them, not because they are forcing nobody to compete with them.

Steam isn’t abusing their dominant position to prevent competition. Other companies could make their own storefront and compete with steam. Nobody does in a way that’s actually comparable to steam.

Steam has a monopoly, but it’s not because steam is actively keeping it that way.

Kecessa ,

If you have enough control on the market you don’t have to actively try and stop competitors, you’re just the default solution and people automatically turn to you. Walmart doesn’t need to use dirty tactics to compete against mom and pop shops, the day they open people just start going to Walmart instead because they have everything in a single place.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

That wasn’t always the case, and I don’t know if it’s currently the case. At least at one point, they would intentionally lose money by dropping their prices below profitability just to get mom and pop shops to shut down, and then raise prices back up to profitability. Or they’d force suppliers to cut costs only for them to the point where the supplier wasn’t making a profit, but by then they had stopped selling to competitors.

There’s a lot more evidence for Walmart committing anti-trust than Valve.

bitfucker ,

And that practice is what? Providing value to the consumer? The thing that MAYBE can be used against them is the clause for selling STEAM KEYS outside of steam. But that is it. Take a look at mindustry, the game is free everywhere else but steam. But that did not violate steam ToS since they didn’t sell the steam keys for less than what is listed on steam.

Kecessa ,

It’s in front of a judge right now and information is public if you want to know more, and no they’re not getting sued for providing value to the consumer (but don’t worry, they charge you enough that they can provide value AND make Newell a billionaire… so maybe you should be angry about that if you don’t care about the rest.)

Kecessa , (edited )

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.

sugar_in_your_tea ,

It’s not about market share, it’s about actually using that market share to negatively impact competition. Steam doesn’t have any sort of exclusivity agreements with anyone, nor do they get paid if a customer buys a key on another platform or on the dev’s own website. There’s no anti-competitive behavior here at all, people use Steam because they like the experience more.

There’s a massive difference between anti-competitive behavior and just being a really good option. You don’t get broken up because you’re successful, you get broken up because you’re abusing your dominant market position. I have yet to see any evidence that Valve does this.

roguetrick ,

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.

Kecessa , (edited )

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.

aphonefriend ,

That’s not what a monopoly is.

Epic had all the money in the world and tons of time (and users) to create a viable alternative. They didn’t fail because valve squeezed them out, they failed because they refuse to improve their product. In fact, it could be said that Epic wanted to become the monopoly themselves. If they spent half as much effort on their product as they do on lawsuits and exclusivity deals, they would have been a viable competitor. But they didn’t. At the end of the day, it sucks to use. Steam does not.

Kecessa ,

EGS is perfectly usable and in my opinion is better than Steam in some aspects (way less bloat, open the app and your games are right there to launch even if you’re on the storefront), your saying they refuse to improve their product just shows you’re not using it because it’s way better than it was on release.

And yes, Valve has a monopoly, they control enough of the market that it goes where they decide it’s going and they’re the default solution people turn to when they need the services they offer, they’re also working on increasing their reach with streaming on the platform, forums, reviews and so on. If all you need is found on a single platform and it’s the platform that a vast majority is using then what do we call that? That’s right, a monopoly.

Want a similar example? Microsoft is considered to be in a monopolistic position with Windows, yet they have competitors, same with Office, same with Explorer back in the day. Google is a monopoly even though competitors exist.

aphonefriend ,

Opinions aside, that’s still not the legal definition of a monopoly.

Monopoly: Exclusive control by one group of the means of producing or selling a commodity or service.

Valve does not have exclusive control of the PC gaming market. The EGS funded lawsuit even says that in the docket. They are only suing on the grounds of the keys issue. I don’t disagree with you that when Newell leaves, things COULD change, but you can’t base the present on the possible future. At this time, steam is on “top” because the vast majority of users have voted with their wallet and time. Not because they are engaged in sweeping anti-competitive backdoor dealings. You know, like EGS does.

Kecessa ,

Well then, by your definition Microsoft never had a monopoly and Google isn’t one either.

mightyfoolish ,

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

(1) Many PC gamers simply wait for games to go on sale. Epic buying exclusive agreements isn’t as dominating of a strategy as they think it is; even if it’s expensive.

(2) Steam is the incumbent. You have to be better in order to be worth it to switch. As you mentioned, Epic is lacking in features

(3) Valve has not treated the desktop market the way Apple as treated the app store. Look at how far Epic has taken Apple to court; compared to their biggest rival, Valve

(4) Valve has put in alot of work in other layers; such as making open hardware and contributing to AMD GPU drivers on Linux. They work on the whole platform, even parts they do not directly make money off. This is called investment.

(5) What exactly would you break Steam into being? One app for reviews, another for buying, and another for launching games? Break the development studio into a different company? Even if Epic is throwing around money made from its game engine and games?

Kecessa ,

That’s the thing though, with their market share an hypothetical competitor could be better and people still wouldn’t switch, Steam is where their games are, it’s where their friends play, building everything from scratch elsewhere wouldn’t be worth the trouble even if the alternative was better.

Store, development, forums, trading platform, launcher, online gaming services, hardware, streaming integrated into the platform, DRM… Valve has their hands all over the place and there’s a single person at the top of that. Wanna wait until they start becoming bad before considering that maybe it’s not a good thing that they have a hold on 70% of the market? Hell, just the fact that Newell could decide that they’re closing their doors tomorrow and no one has access to their games anymore should be fucking worrying to everyone.

mightyfoolish , (edited )

At what seams would you break Steam at? In this day and age those are just app store features. Is there anything you listed Sony, Microsoft or Apple don’t have?

I do understand having a Steam library would make it harder to switch but most of us have a few GOG games and collect Epic free games as well (though, I haven’t even looked at the free Epic games since Christmas).

People even download a launcher like Hero Launcher on the Steamdeck to run games from other stores. We have the freedom to use Steam in tagent with other stores and we do. You can buy a game off GOG and add it to Steam to launch it.

Steam is simply the better product, hands down.

Edit: To prove that I see your point but just don’t agree with it: Here is a quote from an ArsTechnica article about a judge viewing Steam as a monopoly.

Despite those changes, Judge Coughenour once again dismissed Wolfire’s argument that Valve had engaged in “illegal tying” between the Steam platform (which provides game library management, social networking, achievement tracking, Steam Workshop mods, etc.) and the Steam game store (i.e., the part that sells the games). Those two sides of Steam form a single market, the judge wrote, because “commercial viability for a platform is possible only when it generates revenue from a linked game store.” What’s more, the suit has not shown there is any sufficient market demand “for fully functional gaming platforms distinct from game stores.”

Does this judge expect me to buy a game from Epic which is missing features and then pay Valve a fee to contact the developer through Steam? Will Epic cheapen their price by 30% so I can “enable Steam features.” This would be unprecedented. I cannot go to Amazon to return/complain about a product I bought from Walmart.

Harvey656 ,

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

Kecessa ,

So because they’re treating you right it’s ok to put 70% of the market in the hands of a single person?

sugar_in_your_tea ,

They’re not anti-competitive, that’s the difference. Devs can even sell Steam keys on their own website and take 100% of the profit if they so choose, and there’s absolutely no lock-in.

I’m not sure where the anti-trust is. Having a high marketshare by itself doesn’t mean you’re committing anti-trust, abusing that market position does.

Landless2029 ,

Funny the things you can do when you don’t have to worry about shareholders.

lagomorphlecture ,

Cable companies too please.

chemicalprophet ,

Do PG&E

Lost_My_Mind ,

Ooooooooooh shit. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.

Ragnarok314159 ,

Will go to SCOTUS, a few bribes will happen, then it will die.

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