Purposely making code and behind the door deals to exclude any browser development or success for years does, yes.
Steam didn’t destroy ownership of games, scuzzy business practices in the entire industry did. It also affects non-gaming software, movies, most media actually. It wasn’t Valve going “Let’s remove ownership!” In fact it has crept into the physical realm with right to repair and subscription services in cars.
So is Netflix a monopoly then because it wiped out video rental stores? It wasn’t Valve alone again, it was a collusion in the video game industry to go all digital to maximize profit and not have to make concessions to retailers. That’s why they also tried their own platforms.
Blue_Morpho@lemmy.world 1 week ago
There was no code to exclude other browsers. Netscape at the time was the monopoly web browser. Netscape failed because Netscape 4 was a disaster. JWZ wrote about it extensively. I personally experienced Netscape’s failure. Netscape 4 had a bug in their dialer that couldn’t handle area codes. When I called to tell them, despite having already paid tens of thousands to Netscape in licensing fees, they wanted $80k to look at the problem. I called my friends who ran other ISP’s to ask them what they were doing because Netscape 4 was broken. They said they weren’t even trying- they were shipping only IE 4 on their CD’s. I wanted my customers to have the choice so I spent the development time to work around Netscape’s bugs and had my tech support field the calls.
Netscape ran themselves off a cliff. The Netscape coders themselves said so. It is utterly ridiculous to claim that MS sabotaged them somehow with “code and deals”.
As I already said, monopoly is a label given to businesses that have dominant marketshare. It doesn’t matter how it is obtained. Once you own the market, you have restrictions placed on you that smaller companies don’t have to keep the free market working.
That’s not the definition used by the government. You are declared a monopoly and after that restrictions are placed on your actions.