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You can always define something as not a monopoly by asserting the truth that people spend their money on a variety of items so the monopolist is competing with manufacturers and purveyors of beer, diesel and kites for the sales. The existence of monopoly isn't actually the interesting test, the test is usually is there an abuse of market power to the detriment of competitors. Emphasis on "abuse"

The flip side is that you can always define any supplier as a monopoly too. Apple have a monopoly on the supply of IOS and devices running IOS. Semantic definitions of monopoly aren't terribly useful. Budweiser have a monopoly on bud light. Budweiser probably can't use their market power to make miller taste worse than it does.

I didn't much care for Microsoft's anti-competitive behavior, didn't care for the stories from the grey-beard's about IBM's before that. Maybe you've heard of standard oil. I don't care for apple's anti-competitive behavior either. Microsoft and IBM always had plenty of people who defended them too. I didn't need to give Microsoft 30% (is it?) of my sales revenue to sell software that is run by my customer on a microsoft operating system. I wonder if the general reaction would have been much different if microsoft had tried charging a significant percentage of sales revenue for all software vendors selling software that ran on windows in late 90s and early 00s




A monopoly is not always a negative, it is the behaviour of the monopolyquality determines whether it is good or bad.

I remember being taught about YKK, a monopoly producer of zips, they kept their monopoly by producing good quality cheap zips. The profit made was enough that they could stay in business but not enough that it was worth other companies expending capital to get into the market.

Monopoly is one state of the market on a spectrum in a capitalist economy, it is neither good or bad it just is.




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