Not a fan of either, but I fail to see how it is a monopoly. Epic has the money to make their own app store as seen by their PC games one. They could perfectly well just make their own store regardless of Google. This fact alone makes it not a monopoly. Multiply that by how many million other business can put up servers and start an app store (to crash and fail - but besides the point), and by simple logic you prove that Google does not impede competition, and the customer has always the opportunity to use other stores/app platforms such as f-droid, etc. Now, if they locked the ecosystem completely and blocked phones from running apps installed from any other source, that would be a different story. As it is, this is just yet another case of legal ghouls who probably can't setup a wallpaper on their desktop without calling IT deciding tech laws for the rest of us...
"The hypothetical possibility of competition" is definitely not enough to conclude that something is not a monopoly in any legal sense. A monopoly doesn't require 100% control of the market, nor is owning 100% of a market illegal.
> by simple logic you prove that Google does not impede competition
Again, "the hypothetical possibility of competition" does not mean Google isn't impeding things. In fact, the case established quite the opposite:
---
Unlawful Restraint of Trade (Sherman Act Section 1 and California State Law)
Question No. 6:
Did Epic prove, by a preponderance of the evidence and in accordance with the instructions given to you, that Google entered into one or more agreements that unreasonably restrained trade in a relevant antitrust market?
Jury answered: YES
Question No. 7:
If you answered “yes” to Question 6, which of these agreements did you find to be unreasonable restraint(s) of trade in accordance with the instructions given to you?
x DDA agreements
x Agreements with Google’s alleged competitors or potential competitors
under Project Hug or Games Velocity Program
x Agreements with OEMs that sell mobile devices (including MADA and
RSA agreements)
Pardon my ignorance, but can we then infer that upstream, Debian will have similar or better results? What distinguishes Ubuntu in this case from, let's say, less bloated distros? Just a better PR department, or are there any technical reasons to single it out?
