Some companies such as standard oil had extraordinarily effective vertically integrated monopolies. The issues came into play when they used their market dominance to secure things like rebate structures with rail roads and made agreements to buy up transit capacity at very favorable rates that left competitors at a serious disadvantage.
A real question might be how Nvidia prioritizes capacity and delivery and pricing to OpenAI and Microsoft for their superior product that has no meaningful competitor. It’s not an issue that Nvidia, like standard oil, had a superior business and product. It’s an issue when their scale and the scale of their adjacent partners lead to agreements that strangle others that need access to the supply chain. For instance if Anthropic is at a disadvantage to open ai for Nvidia capacity due to agreements between them that are mutually beneficial to the exclusion of Anthropic, that’s anti competitive.
Say that Nvidia partners with open AI because they think open AI is the best positioned to succeed (and hence result in increase demand for Nvidia) as opposed to if they got some direct financial kickback, it that legal?
Probably yes if Nvidia has a monopoly. Because competitors of open ai have no alternatives they’ve killed competition. If doing so is to their advantage that doesn’t make it better, that just makes it rational from their perspective. But regulation against anticompetitive behavior targets behavior that structurally kills competition. Most collusion isn’t direct financial transfers but cooperative agreements to dominate adjacent markets for mutual benefit.
They even lost market share during the time they were alleged of having and exploiting a monopoly:
> Although Standard had 90 percent of American refining capacity in 1880, by 1911, that had shrunk to between 60 and 65 percent because of the expansion in capacity by competitors.
If you read the article rather than selectively quoting antitrust movement on standard oil started in 1880s and culminated in 1911. Likewise Netscape vs Microsoft concluded long after Netscape was very dead. The fact litigation and stuff takes a long time to unfold is not a material fact in such a case. A large part of standard oils erosion of market share was an attempt to prop up their case against breakup as well as headwinds against them due to the governments pursuit.
But it’s a bizarre misreading to say they were not a monopoly to say that by the time things hit the fan they had lost a lot of market share from their peak monopoly.
The specific issues that standard oil hit up against was their deals with railroads that solely benefited them by virtue of their scale and their ability to effectively dictate their own pricing for logistics. Likewise they would buy up all capacity on crucial lines for competitors and only partially use it purely to block market access for competitors. There is also a view that being incredibly efficient can reduce competition in markets adjacent to you. Success in business for an individual company isn’t the only goal of a capitalist state, but rather competition in markets is considered a goal of the state in itself - survival of the fittest implies there’s something to survive against, and an ever expanding monopoly growing into new markets and dominating them starts to retard innovation and competition systemically. You don’t have to agree with the thesis, but that’s the way the system works.
Another point with nvidia isn't "better product" but "what API does everyone use" and that's CUDA. Owned by NVIDIA. It would be like if SGI, who invented openGL as an open source version of their proprietary Iris GL, kept it proprietary, and now everyone uses SGI hardware because all games and 3D software use Iris GL. In this scenario SGI may also be very keen to make sure Iris GL has quirks that strongly tie it to SGI-only hardware to keep dominance. That seems a little more "okay you're overleveraging your position" versus "you put out a better product in a fair market"
> Another point with nvidia isn't "better product" but "what API does everyone use" and that's CUDA. Owned by NVIDIA.
One could very easily argue this is the status-quo; Microsoft ships DirectX which they withhold from competitors, and Apple does the same with Metal. Both of those monopolize their respective markets (PC gaming and mobile gaming) yet we see zero attempts to reconcile the two.
Because of the perceived hostility between vendors, I would not be surprised to see Nvidia argue that they're already as open as they could possibly be.
Except this isn’t actually even true on the surface.
Apple doesn’t have a monopoly on mobile gaming or even mobile. Windows is more of a monopoly than iOS, but it’s not a monopoly in gaming platforms by a large margin. OpenGL is a totally viable alternative. Etc.
CUDA is definitely a big part of the lock Nvidia has on their market. Other companies could with investment out class then hardware wise. But because of their API lock there’s no point.
Not really, given that Apple platforms have more or less entirely depreciated the featureset with no guarantee or expectation to keep it around.
> Other companies could with investment out class then hardware wise.
I don't even believe you. Who else can compete with Mellanox networking and custom ARM v9 cores? Even Apple doesn't really ship anything worth comparing to Nvidia's server offerings, and they're arguably best-positioned to usurp Nvidia's TSMC friendship.
If they wanted to, Nvidia could pick winners and losers in AI by withholding GPUs. That would be using their power in one market to influence another market. I haven't seen much evidence of that though.
Except as there’s a backlog if the enter into collusive agreements as a monopoly they are impacting adjacent markets (AI and adjacent companies competing with open ai and Microsoft). Also bulk pricing agreements can be seen as collusive even without inventory scarcity because it structurally advantages a picked winner.
When you hold a monopoly the same rules don’t apply. That’s why it’s often advantageous to allow material competition in your own market because your adjacency influence can be outsized and cause unintended consequences -even if you normally would have been allowed to do such things-. Those unintended consequences don’t require malicious intent they just have to exist and be materially a result of your monopoly. The more your maliciously collude though the worse the remedy will be for you.
A real question might be how Nvidia prioritizes capacity and delivery and pricing to OpenAI and Microsoft for their superior product that has no meaningful competitor. It’s not an issue that Nvidia, like standard oil, had a superior business and product. It’s an issue when their scale and the scale of their adjacent partners lead to agreements that strangle others that need access to the supply chain. For instance if Anthropic is at a disadvantage to open ai for Nvidia capacity due to agreements between them that are mutually beneficial to the exclusion of Anthropic, that’s anti competitive.