What “Market Dominance”?
Believing that wealth corrupts and corporate wealth corrupts absolutely
Today in 1998, The U.S. Department of Justice and twenty states filed a set of civil actions against Microsoft Corporation. The plaintiffs alleged that Microsoft abused monopoly power regarding operating system and Web browser sales. The central issue was whether it was monopolistic of Microsoft to bundle Internet Explorer software with its Windows operating system.
Writing about the antitrust movement of the late 19th century and early 20th century, Liah Greenfeld observes in The Spirit of Capitalism: Nationalism and Economic Growth:
The inevitable result of supreme business success was the end, or at least a severe limitation, of further competition… This… justified condemning as a “monopoly” a corporation which realized the spirit of competition best, and while in the past the surest method to fight this evil (and to foster liberty of trade) was thought to be the lifting of all restrictions on competition at the starting point, now it seemed to be the establishment of a ceiling on the possible achievement. Nobody should aspire to be so much more than others, was the implied message; this did not agree with the American notion of equality…. In this instance, Americans believed that wealth corrupts and corporate wealth corrupts absolutely.
Ryan Bourne in “Is This Time Different? Schumpeter, the Tech Giants, and Monopoly Fatalism” (2019):
Today, the notion that continued dominance for Microsoft in the browser market was inevitable seems almost quaint…. it was from roughly 2006 onward that new competition in the browser market really took off… By the end of 2019 it is estimated that Chrome will have a global market share of close to 64 percent, followed by Safari with 15 percent, and IE with just 3 percent… These days Google’s web presence, including its presence in the browser and search engine markets, is a cause of much consternation. Yet the Netscape and IE examples suggest that sustained dominance based on product complementarity is not inevitable.