Comment by vel0city
17 hours ago
> There's nothing forcing you to use Chrome instead of Edge
This is what I mean. How is it a "monopoly" when one can easily just use something else?
The only thing people are saying its "its a monopoly because it has high market share". But a high market share does not a monopoly make, there's more to it than just purely market share. A monopoly requries outsized market power, something that to me at least it doesn't seem like Chrome, the web browser has.
The argument others are making is that Google has a monopoly on browser engines, or that it's becoming that way. IE switched to Chromium partially to resolve compatibility issues. I don't have a strong opinion on this though.
People being able to switch relatively easily means that they're a lot more likely to lose their market power in five years. It doesn't do much to diminish their current market power, which is enormous.
High market share almost always means high market power. That's why people focus on market share since it's easy to cite.
> they're a lot more likely to lose their market power in five years
It doesn't take users five years to install a different browser. It takes maybe two to five minutes. If they really do things to piss off their users they'll be gone far faster than that.
What kind of lock-in does a browser even really have? Its not like some kind of social network or financial setup or anything like that. The browser itself doesn't have the content. Its run an installer, have it import bookmarks and extensions, and you're using a different browser. Its not like we're back in the days of ActiveX where there were entirely proprietary extensions to the web that only Microsoft blessed browsers could run that only ran on certain OSes.
> almost always means high market power.
It doesn't when the competition is so readily available, practically interchangeable, and also zero cost.