But it’s not copyrighted if it’s AI-generated, right? Or are there human co-writers and/or performers?

Steam’s “most favored nation” contracts with devs explicitly prohibit this

Steam’s “most favored nation” contracts with devs explicitly prohibit this

Why should we care about this particular horse/kart race?

Continuing the great American tradition of jury nullification

That’s just begging the question, isn’t it, requiring a conviction as a monopolist as the only acceptable form of evidence of monopolization? If someone said the same thing about Google when Epic sued them in 2020, would you have waited the 3 years it took to get a trial verdict before making up your mind?

Also, many arbitration settlements include NDAs as a condition of getting a payout, so it’s disingenuous to say they could provide evidence that might require their clients to forfeit their settlements or risk them getting disbarred.

I agree the venue is unfortunate, but why are you insisting on giving the giant for-profit corporation the benefit of the doubt rather than the consumers who are trying to hold them accountable?

You’ve only highlighted what’s so fucked up about binding arbitration: it’s secretive. It forces plaintiffs to retain individual counsel, with arbitration clauses in contracts typically blocking class actions in public court and requiring you to waive your right to a trial by a jury of your peers. This means there is no precedent that is set or that binds future decisions by the arbitrator, there is no public record that gets reported on and embarrasses companies, and there are no large payouts to be recovered when a million people get nickel-and-dimed for a few bucks each and can sue as a class.

The question isn’t so much whether a company is a monopoly, or part of a duopoly, or oligopoly, but whether their market power lets them coerce their rivals, suppliers, customers, etc. It’s a common misconception that a company needs 100% of a market before they can exert monopoly power (as a seller), and the threshold is even lower for monopsony power (as a buyer), which is common in labor markets with powerful employers, for example.

Legal thresholds for application of anti-monopoly laws have historically been quite low as well. For example, in Brown Shoe Co. v. United States in 1962, the US Supreme Court approved blocking a merger between Brown, a company that manufactured less than 6% of shoes in the US, and Kinney, a company that sold only 2% of shoes! And that actually seems like the right approach, since the Clayton Act, for example, doesn’t only prohibit acquiring 100% of a market (which would render it worthless), but blocks any acquisition when “the effect of such acquisition may be substantially to lessen competition.”

Um, there is more than one type of anticompetitive practice? Amazon uses predatory pricing to drive companies out of business, Microsoft uses tying to sell Teams, Google uses self-preferencing for their own services in search results, Facebook acquired Instagram rather than compete with them, etc.

One of Valve’s favorite anticompetitive cudgels is requiring “most favored nation” clauses in their contracts, prohibiting devs from selling for less on other storefronts (which Amazon also has used).

Do you also think Google isn’t a search monopoly because Bing exists? This is a very bad argument that completely ignores market power.

Do you know what monopoly means?

The number of people in this thread claiming that Steam is not a monopoly is too damn high. If actually you’re interested in the evidence, the Organized Money podcast recently had a great interview with pair of lawyers whose full time job is suing Valve as a monopolist on antitrust grounds, and winning over and over on behalf of their clients.

Developers aren’t forced to exclusively ship on Steam or not at all.

That’s just not true in practical terms. If you want your game to be discovered and you don’t have a massive advertising budget, it’s not a serious option to try to forego selling on Steam while staying in business as a game developer. That’s like saying Amazon isn’t an ecommerce monopoly because you’re not “forced” to sell there, even though that would mean bankruptcy and irrelevance for most sellers.

By this logic Google isn’t a search monopoly because DuckDuckGo exists, despite Google buying default placement in Safari, Firefox, Chrome, etc to make sure no other search provider can compete, with their bribe to Apple alone totaling $20 billion a year to maintain their search dominance. What do you think monopoly power is if not that?

This “most favored nation” clause in contracts is huge! It means that even if another store takes half of Steam’s cut (say, 15% vs 30%), the game can’t be sold for less, meaning other rival stores can never compete on price. In other words, Steam drives up prices for games economy-wide. Amazon does something similar, and this was part of the basis the FTC’s antitrust lawsuit against them.

Ignore OP’s weird question, the book looks really cool

The Treasury will put more numbers on a spreadsheet, because the US is a sovereign currency issuer

Those things are not mutually exclusive, JP!

Hanlon’s Razor seems much more apt, suggesting OP’s incompetence rather than malice