At its core antitrust cases are about monopolies and how companies use anti-competitive conduct to maintain their monopoly.
Github isn't the only source control software in the market. Unless they're doing something obvious and nefarious, its doubtful the justice department will step in when you can simply choose one of many others like Bitbucket, Sourcetree, Gitlab, SVN, CVS, Fossil, DARCS, or Bazaar.
There's just too much competition in the market right now for the govt to do anything.
Minimal changes have occurred to the concept of “antitrust” since its inception as a form of societal justice against corporations, at least per my understanding.
I doubt policymakers in the early 1900s could have predicted the impact of technology and globalization on the corporate landscape, especially vis a vis “vertical integration”.
Personally, I think vertical integration is a pretty big blind spot in laws and policies that are meant to ensure that consumers are not negatively impacted by anticompetitive corporate practices. Sure, “competition” may exist, but the market activity often shifts meaningfully in a direction that is harmful consumers once the biggest players swallow another piece of the supply chain (or product concept), and not just their competitors.
There was a change in the enforcement of antitrust law in the 1970s. Consumer welfare, which came to mean lower prices, is the standard. Effectively normal competition is fine and takes egregious behavior to be violation. It even assumes that big companies are more efficient which makes up for lack of competition.
The other change is reluctance to break up companies. AT&T break up was big deal. Microsoft survived being broken up in its antitrust trial. Tech companies can only be broken up vertically, but maybe the forced competition would be enough.
Not really. It's a network effect, like Facebook. Value scales quadratically with the number of users, because nobody wants to "have to check two apps".
We should buy out monopolies like the Chinese government does. If you corner the market, then you get a little payout and a "You beat capitalism! Play again?" prize. Other companies can still compete but the customers will get a nice state-funded high-quality option forever.
Not sure how having downtime is an anti-competition issue. I'm also not sure how you think you can take things away from people? Do you think someone just gave them GitHub and then take it away? Who are you expecting to take it away? Also, does your system have 100% uptime?
Companies used to be forced to sell parts of their business when antitrust was involved. The issue isn't the downtime, they should never have been allowed to own this in the first place.
There was just a recent case with Google to decide if they would have to sell Chrome. Of course the Judge ruled no. Nowadays you can have a monopoly in 20 adjacent industries and the courts will say it's fine.
You've been banging on about this for a while, I think this is my third time responding to one of your accounts. There is no antitrust issue, how are they messing with other competitors? You never back up your reasoning. How many accounts do you have active since I bet all the downvotes are from you?
I've had two accounts. I changed because I don't like the history (maybe one other person has the same opinion I did?). Anyways it's pretty obvious why this is an issue. Microsoft has a historical issue with being brutal to competition. There is no oversight as to what they do with the private data on GitHub. It's absolutely an antitrust issue. Do you need more reasoning?
Didn't you just privately tell me it was 4 accounts? Maybe that was someone else hating on Windows 95. But you need an active reason not what they did 20 years ago.
The more stable/secure a monopoly is in its position the less incentive it has to deliver high quality services.
If a company can build a monopoly (or oligopoly) in multiple markets, it can then use these monopolies to build stability for them all. For example, Google uses ads on the Google Search homepage to build a browser near-monopoly and uses Chrome to push people to use Google Search homepage. Both markets have to be attacked simultaneously by competitors to have a fighting chance.
At its core antitrust cases are about monopolies and how companies use anti-competitive conduct to maintain their monopoly.
Github isn't the only source control software in the market. Unless they're doing something obvious and nefarious, its doubtful the justice department will step in when you can simply choose one of many others like Bitbucket, Sourcetree, Gitlab, SVN, CVS, Fossil, DARCS, or Bazaar.
There's just too much competition in the market right now for the govt to do anything.
Minimal changes have occurred to the concept of “antitrust” since its inception as a form of societal justice against corporations, at least per my understanding.
I doubt policymakers in the early 1900s could have predicted the impact of technology and globalization on the corporate landscape, especially vis a vis “vertical integration”.
Personally, I think vertical integration is a pretty big blind spot in laws and policies that are meant to ensure that consumers are not negatively impacted by anticompetitive corporate practices. Sure, “competition” may exist, but the market activity often shifts meaningfully in a direction that is harmful consumers once the biggest players swallow another piece of the supply chain (or product concept), and not just their competitors.
There was a change in the enforcement of antitrust law in the 1970s. Consumer welfare, which came to mean lower prices, is the standard. Effectively normal competition is fine and takes egregious behavior to be violation. It even assumes that big companies are more efficient which makes up for lack of competition.
The other change is reluctance to break up companies. AT&T break up was big deal. Microsoft survived being broken up in its antitrust trial. Tech companies can only be broken up vertically, but maybe the forced competition would be enough.
Picking something other than Github may also have the positive effect that you're less of a target for drive by AI patches.
Can they use Github to their advantage to maintain a monopoly if they are nefarious? Think about it.
Unfortunately the question is "have they", not "can they".
> you can simply choose one of many others
Not really. It's a network effect, like Facebook. Value scales quadratically with the number of users, because nobody wants to "have to check two apps".
We should buy out monopolies like the Chinese government does. If you corner the market, then you get a little payout and a "You beat capitalism! Play again?" prize. Other companies can still compete but the customers will get a nice state-funded high-quality option forever.
Forever, for sure, definitely. State sponsored projects are never subject to the whims of uninformed outsiders.
> Not sure how this isn't an antitrust issue anyway.
Simple: the US stopped caring about antitrust decades ago.
It's not an antitrust issue because antitrust laws aren't enforced in the U.S.
That's on every individual that decided to "give it" to Microsoft. Git was made precisely to make this problem go away.
Git is like 10% of building software.
If GitHub is doing 90% more than Git does, "GitHub" is a terrible name for it.
Not sure how having downtime is an anti-competition issue. I'm also not sure how you think you can take things away from people? Do you think someone just gave them GitHub and then take it away? Who are you expecting to take it away? Also, does your system have 100% uptime?
Companies used to be forced to sell parts of their business when antitrust was involved. The issue isn't the downtime, they should never have been allowed to own this in the first place.
There was just a recent case with Google to decide if they would have to sell Chrome. Of course the Judge ruled no. Nowadays you can have a monopoly in 20 adjacent industries and the courts will say it's fine.
You've been banging on about this for a while, I think this is my third time responding to one of your accounts. There is no antitrust issue, how are they messing with other competitors? You never back up your reasoning. How many accounts do you have active since I bet all the downvotes are from you?
I've had two accounts. I changed because I don't like the history (maybe one other person has the same opinion I did?). Anyways it's pretty obvious why this is an issue. Microsoft has a historical issue with being brutal to competition. There is no oversight as to what they do with the private data on GitHub. It's absolutely an antitrust issue. Do you need more reasoning?
Didn't you just privately tell me it was 4 accounts? Maybe that was someone else hating on Windows 95. But you need an active reason not what they did 20 years ago.
Nope. If someone did that it should be reported if it's against the rules here.
Do you also post "Take it away from $OWNER" every time your open source software breaks?
If he posted every time GitHub broke, he would have certainly have posted a bunch of times.
What antitrust issue does my open source software have?
What does antitrust have to do with the GitHub services downtime?
The more stable/secure a monopoly is in its position the less incentive it has to deliver high quality services.
If a company can build a monopoly (or oligopoly) in multiple markets, it can then use these monopolies to build stability for them all. For example, Google uses ads on the Google Search homepage to build a browser near-monopoly and uses Chrome to push people to use Google Search homepage. Both markets have to be attacked simultaneously by competitors to have a fighting chance.
It regularly breaks the workflow for thousands of FLOSS projects.