> Would you mind explaining how a company could hold monopoly power while not actually holding a monopoly?
Quite arguably, you can’t, but monopoly power (particularly, its expression as pricing power) can be observable (and itself proves an actual monopoly) when monopoly would not be clear by other means.
The ability to price without sales going to a competitor demonstrates the absence of actual competition, regardless of the superficial apparent competition in a described market.
> It's using an advantage in one area to force concessions in an unrelated area that I believe is illegal.
Can you find me a single example of a monopoly (excluding regulated utilities) that don't use their power to force concessions in an unrelated area? What's the point otherwise?
You're really fixated on this phrase but you don't really seem to understand what they mean. A literal monopoly means a single company that controls the entire market. Of course that is not required. I did not say a literal monopoly was required. The text I quoted did not say a literal monopoly was required. No one said a literal monopoly was required.
The text I quoted says that monopoly power is required. That is all.
> Could you name an existing stable monopoly that is not a state-granted monopoly.
No, because we have regulations to prevent them and break them up.
There are a number of entities that are clearly restraining their classically monopolistic behavior BECAUSE of the regulations such as Microsoft, Google and Amazon.
> a monopoly will have a much easier time extracting value
That's my point. In the static picture it might seem so, but in the dynamic picture the extracting of the value incentivizes competitors to enter and consumers to seek substitutes.
Would you mind mentioning an example of long lasting monopoly power (which is different than just being the sole seller of something -- after all, everyone is the sole seller of something)?
Like Walmart has a monopoly on shelf space at walmart.
Apple does not have a monopoly on neither Phones nor on application markets for phones. They have a very attractive market, which they control, but not a monopoly.
> Can someone explain how Google has a monopoly when there are competitors in their league?
Being a monopoly doesn’t mean you have no competitors - it means you have enough control of the market to artificially affect/set the market price for something (ie that there was not enough competition for efficient pricing).
> You can have a monopoly situation where competition just doesn’t bother to enter because the monopoly holder hasn’t abused the situation to make entering the market attractive.
Do you have any real world examples of this actually happening?
> the government frequently grants monopolies because they don’t really want to see market competition due to the disruptive nature of the industry (e.g. utilities).
The government does this with the addition of heavy regulation specifically to prevent abuse that comes from having monopolistic control of a market.
> Monopoly is if one corporation owns an entire market.
This isn't quite right. Traditionally for a company to be a monopoly it isn't even required it control a majority of the market. It has more to do with the company being in a privileged circumstance in a market and explicitly using that privilege to bolster themselves or suppress competition in the same or related markets.
An example is Microsoft with Netscape. Microsoft was sued with anti-trust laws not because IE or Windows owned the entire market, but because Windows gave Microsoft a privileged place in the web-browser market that they abused.
> Do you see how your original statement was misleading? Monopoly power
No, it is not misleading. Instead, your terms are misleading.
They are misleading, because when someone says "monopoly power", what someone would immediately jump to is a singular firm.
But that is not true. Instead, the only thing required is significant and durable market power.
The less misleading term would be to say that a company only has to have significant and durable market power, for it to fall under anti trust law, and you should also point out that it does not require a literal singular firm.
> when you see someone use the term "monopoly power"
No, actually. What I will do is correct them to instead use the less misleading term.
It is a huge misconception that people have, that anti trust law only requires a singular firm for it to apply. It is extremely common for people to say that.
It is so common that the literal FTC had to made this clarification in their official information that they released.
If the freaking FTC had to release this clarification, then I think that it is important to point this out.
> It will reduce confusion.
What would instead reduce confusion even more, is if people made a specific effort to point out that a singular firm is not required for anti trust law to apply.
Because this is the most common misconception when people talk about anti trust law.
(It is so common that the FTC has to clarify this in their documents!)
Would you mind explaining how a company could hold monopoly power while not actually holding a monopoly?
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