this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2025
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What is it about reddit-style social media that brings out the obnoxious le redditeur archetypes? You're just talking out of your ass and being snarky about it. Peak redditing.
Putting words in my mouth. I didn't say monopolies are illegal, you just made that up to be snarky. The rest of your comment is just you pulling stuff out of your ass with no kind of citation whatsoever.
When the government tries to pursue a case to try and break up a monopoly, they're not trying to prove that the company fits some textbook definition of the word "monopoly". That'd be stupid, and lawyers may be a lot of things, but "stupid" generally isn't one of them.
They start by defining a specific market or markets that the company participates in, showing consumer harms (aka the consumer welfare standard, which actually sucks and the Biden admin was trying to correct, but whatever) by the company's business practices/structure, and recommending remedies, like a break up. So it technically doesn't even have to do with the size of a company or their market share (although that's usually a major component).
Again, this conclusion is based on your incorrect understanding of how antitrust regulation works. So there's no point in me correcting the rest of your post. Instead, I'll summarize and translate it into what I think you actually wanted to say:
"I like Valve and you're a meanie for implying they're doing something bad"
Pot calling the kettle black. 🙄
Hilarious. With confidence, I will let people read both our posts and draw their own conclusions.
“Putting words in my mouth. I didn't say monopolies are illegal, you just made that up to be snarky.”
The person you responded to said that a majority preferring one option out of many was not monopolistic behaviour. Your “snarky” answer was “you’re wrong”. (Spoiler: he wasn’t). That you want to go from that to whining about me is cute.
For the benefit of any thinking people reading this far, antitrust laws make the abusive application of market power an illegal behaviour. They do not outlaw market success. Being unpopular with @entwine is not illegal either.
Here's that person's comment again:
First of all, your paraphrasing doesn't make sense because it sounds like you're saying consumers can engage in monopolistic behavior via their shopping choices. I'll assume you were just being lazy with the wording, and interpret it as you agreeing with the statement that "a monopoly is when consumers only have one choice".
I explained in my comment above that this is not true, and I even linked to a Wikipedia article written by people who know more about this than you or I. If you haven't read it, please do. It's not even that long. The sidebar has links to relevant topics that go into more detail about competition law, which I highly recommend exploring.
You're choosing to remain ignorant. I want to know, what's in it for you? What do you gain from doing this? It can't just be the dopamine from seeing number go up, because that has to get old after a while.
My motivation in threads like these is to help share the limited knowledge I have with other people, because the world works better when people know how it works. I'm not a lawyer, but I'm an antitrust nerd as it's a pretty massive issue in the industry where I work (tech), and my experience is that there are a ton of people like you two with an incorrect understanding of how the law actually works. This is counter productive to solving the antitrust issue because misinformed people end up voting for the wrong things (and/or influencing policy in other ways).