They were using the word correctly, "monopoly" doesn't only mean greatly dominant player in an open market. Current consoles are by definition vertical monopolies.
I think we should encourage this framing of "monopoly" more.
You can be a tiny company and still be a monopoly. If you're the only grocery store in a (walkable) town where many elderly people don't own a car, you're a monopoly. If you're the only company allowed to sell beer at a football game (that doesn't allow fans to bring liquids into the stadium), you're a monopoly. If you're a school cantine, and school rules forbid students from walking out during the school day, you're also a monopoly.
None of your examples pass any of the checks for a monopoly unless you twist the definition of "market" to be the narrowest possible. Situational exclusivity is not the same as a monopoly, and these examples don't pass the hypothetical monopolist test or the cellophane fallacy.
The Supreme Court ruled once on what they consider an aftermarket monopoly against Kodak in the 1990s, but the aftermarket angle on monopolies has been basically abandoned from a legal perspective because it was shaky at best.
Both iOS and Android both generate more in gaming revenue than Sony. The PC gaming market is only slightly smaller than the entirety of the console market. It's going to be very difficult to make an argument that customers don't have reasonable choice, and the recent case against Apple set precedent that owning the single channel of distribution to a product and platform you own isn't monopolistic unless you do shady things like Google did.
Sony's exclusive rights to distributing games on its owned platform and console will not give it pricing power (won't pass SNNIP) or exclude competition.
Sony can be called a dick for what they're doing without it also having to be monopolistic. People are right to be angry and calling them a monopoly over it is being cathartic.
There is no legal, economic, or dictionary definition of monopoly that supports your position. The closest example is "aftermarket" (what you call vertical) following the 90's Kodak SC case, which has long since fizzled out. Monopoly might as well not mean anything if you can define it however narrowly you want.
'1: exclusive ownership through legal privilege, command of supply, or concerted action
specifically : exclusive control of a particular market that is marked by the power to control prices and exclude competition.'
That definition doesn't define any boundaries on to what market a company has control over. A hardware platform like Playstation only has one store, run by the company who sells the platform; explicit control of the particular market, that market being Playstation games. By going digital only, they now have total command of supply. They also explicitly deny competition from participating. They even have a hand in pricing the games sold on the platforms, an ability they're able to leverage because they hold a vertical monopoly.
The issue isn't me or anyone else defining the word "monopoly" too broadly, it's that the frog has so thoroughly been boiled on what we once considered monopolies that we can no longer see a monopoly for what it is even when it's self-evidently obvious. I agree that anti-trust enforcement has become lax, I'm not arguing that it hasn't... but it shouldn't have. It's been about 30 years of letting big tech and media conglomerates do whatever they want and it is time for that to stop, and not just for video games.
They've always had control by licensing who can publish games on their platform. Now that contract with publishers has changed who can distribute. Publishers are still free to distribute on other platforms in whatever formats those platforms allow.
> that market being Playstation games
This is arbitrarily narrowing the definition of market as far as possible while ignoring reasonable (legal) thresholds. Case in point how Apple's App Store was not ruled a monopoly while Google's Play Store was - there are reasonable tests to pass, and Sony's case will land closer to Apple than Google. And a monopoly is not the only form of anti-competitive abuse.
Might as well claim Domino's has a monopoly on Domino's pizza.
> This is arbitrarily narrowing the definition of market as far as possible
No it isn't, it's literally a market.
Dominos pizzas aren't created and sold by third parties. If you're going to make a comparison, try something doesn't so obviously miss the point (though if you want to talk about commercial food supply chains and how that's become almost entirely monopolized in the United States...).
The rest of your argument is basically "the law says so". Not an argument I'm interested in discussing since I don't care. I explicitly want legislative changes.
Agreed. AWS is downright hostile about giving you any idea about what resources you actually have deployed, to the point where it must be deliberately malicious. Even their billing page is terrible for tracing down the root cause of usage with the default configuration.
You have to go into third party tooling if you want any chance of seeing what’s actually going on, especially if there’s any odds of you deploying stuff in another region and even moreso if you have more than 1 account.
At this point, I’d say it should be a best practice of owning 2 AWS accounts, even as a hobbyist: one payer account with a HEAVILY locked down SCP and then a child account with the stuff you’re deploying.
Nah, it's "We dont want to provide a consistent model that we'll be stuck with supporting for a decade because it just takes up space; until we run everyone out of business, we can't afford to have customers tying their systems to any given model"
Really, the economics makes no sense, but that's what they're doing. You can't have a consistent model because it'll pin their hardware & software, and that costs money.
Until it had backup storage. Which ended up being useful in 2011 when tens of thousands of mailboxes were deleted due to a software bug and needed to be recovered from tape...
It was a different company back then. The Internet was still new-ish and not the multi-trillion dollar company it is now. I'd think expectations are different.
