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Is it any different from a movie theatre or restaurant selling only Pepsi products due to exclusive agreement?

Or Playstation paying for a game to be distributed only on their platform?

How about a sports team only allowing Reebok or Nike or Adidas or whatever?

Don't get me started on Netflix only movies!



Yes, all these are anti-competitive. But illegally anti-competitive? That is not really possible to resolve in a HN comment. Every market in every region is different, and whether some exclusive contract is or is not anti-competitive has to be resolved in court, which looks at all the details of the matter.


1) Whataboutism is not a counterpoint

2) Half of these are completely nonsensical and apples and oranges to the topic.


It's not whataboutism. Whataboutism would be 'what about children dying in Darfur?'

This is an explanation that this practice is normal in a competitive environment and trying to prevent exclusive deals is silly if you extrapolate it to other domains

In other words, create a rule or principal that's clear and not specific to this situation. Because right now the principal seems to be exclusive deals between businesses should be illegal and I explained a handful of cases where this would obviously apply


The fact that monopolistic agreements are common place doesn't make them competitive.

As with every single time something monopolistic comes up on HN. You can squash one instance of it at a time; you do not need to address every single one in a fell swoop.




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