They spent extraordinary amounts of money to capture the market and drive competitors out of business. It's called predatory pricing and it should be punished, not rewarded.
They forced a bad deal on competing networks via those networks' own customers. The prize was capturing margin and exporting cost of business.
The language about controlling the examples that consumers use as a frame of reference is telling. This is a business that has mastered the game of baiting 1st parties against 2nd parties while negotiating price as a 3rd party.
They're probably doing all they can. The problem is their dominance, both means they have effectively an entire industry looking for loopholes in everything they do, as well as legal considerations (arbitrarily punishing individual smaller actors might skirt on the territory of anti-competitive behavior)
I could be wrong, but I think intentionally operating at a loss in order to make it impossible for others to compete would run afoul antitrust / predatory pricing laws in most countries.
To me this seems to be an attempt to leverage their dominant position at the time to further strengthen it, and eventually failing to strong-arm the industry.
What struck me most was the part about another giant corporation abusing its monopoly position to screw a competitor, at the of the expense of the customer.
Imagine how much more disruption they would be in this market if a bunch of the largest incumbents weren't illegally colluding with each other to keep prices artificially high.
Exactly what I was thinking while reading this article. Taking advantage of control of one market to push it's own products in favor of competitors in another market.
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