It’s not apples to oranges, because the network effects (and coercive pressures they create) are in fact incredibly similar: sellers have to go where most customers are, and most PC gamers begin and end their search for games on Steam, just like most online shoppers begin and end their searches on Amazon.

Nobody thinks that it’s impossible, which is incredibly rare, but rather that it’s very costly not to comply, which is the source of every monopolist’s power. Could Pepsi refuse to sell at Walmart to avoid the huge wholesale discounts they demand over smaller stores? Sure, but it would shoot themselves in the foot, and that’s the source of Walmart’s anticompetitive power, which coerces Pepsi (and lots of other suppliers) and hurts lots of smaller businesses who don’t get the same discount.

Anecdotes are not data!

And Hitler was a vegetarian, but that tells us literally nothing about whether we should abuse animals in factory farms

Because partisanship. They are on Team Gaben, and can only understand criticism of valve as expressing support for Team Epic. It’s exactly the same as when libs construe any and all criticism of Democrats as support for Trump.

Appeal to expertise is not an appeal to authority. Otherwise we could never cite scientists, epidemiologists, or other experts. You might be interested in the fallacy of equivocation.

I would use other words, but I don’t think you are actually interested in understanding market power, coercion, or network effects. It is a little tricky, but if you’re not just shitposting in bad faith, Lina Khan has a great paper on digital platform monopolies and Matt Stoller has a good podcast on Valvle’s monopoly in particular. Or does Matt Stoller also not understand what a monopoly is, according to you?

And ecommerce sellers don’t “have to” sell on Amazon, so they don’t have any market power they can abuse to extract 40-50% fees from sellers, right?

Being obviously self-interested doesn’t make him wrong about app store monopolies, whether Apple, Google, or Valve.

The commentor was saying that skins cost Apple nothing to produce, not Epic, which is why the Apple App Store profit margin is estimated to be around 78%. I think you misread the comment.

Exactly. The number of people on Lemmy who simp for Valve’s monopoly just because Epic (along with every game developer, big or small) stands to benefit is kind of shocking.

I don’t know, that just seems too simple. There’s a good argument to be made that technology can embody political values and power relations, apart from its designers. The “guns don’t kill people” line doesn’t hold much water when all the empirical evidence shows that the mere presence of guns makes us less safe, for example. Similarly, it’s not especially important why tech bros do what they do, or if they have good or bad motives, if the things they make hurt people or destroy the biosphere. The purpose of a thing is what it does, regardless of what its maker intended it to do.

Why not both? We can oppose both Gemini and Pichai

If you’re picking them, you’re probably paid by the gallon

What a stupid headline for a 300-year-old idea

Introducing E-Corp stablecoin!

Informed for sure, but pithy they are not, with a recent post clocking in at 19,000 words!

The truth is paywalled, but the lies are free!

Kamala would have defended DMCA and Big Tech to the death. The only difference might have been a little less crypto grifting, but it’s nonsense to suggest there would have been a major difference on the issues this article is actually discussing.

A manifestation (or “manif” for short) is the word for a (political) protest in some languages