Having a monopoly isn't illegal. Using a monopoly as power in another market is. Microsoft got hit because they used their monopoly in desktop operating systems to freeze out competition in the browser market and jam IE down people's throats. The browser market being a different market than the desktop operating system market.

> Having a monopoly isn't illegal. Using a monopoly as power in another market is.

Mm.

With the caveat that I'm not a lawyer, that seems like "we gave away the source code to this engine" might still count as abusing market dominance in one domain (browser) to support another (ads)?

At least in principle. I couldn't describe the specifics of such laws even if a lawyer helped me out.

> With the caveat that I'm not a lawyer, that seems like "we gave away the source code to this engine" might still count as abusing market dominance in one domain (browser) to support another (ads)?

There has to be a link. How does one influence the other?

I don't think "making sure that non-crappy web browsers exist" is enough.

There doesn’t have to be a link… there has to be a competitive market. Giving away something that someone else sells can be anti-competitive, in certain situations. For example, if the goal of Google with V8 is to create a JS engine monopoly so that they could then start charging for it — that would be anti-competitive.

If there were calls for V8 to be considered a monopoly, you’d first have to prove that there are viable competitors available and they were being harmed. And particularly — was that harm impacting consumers. Anti trust only gets involved when consumers are being harmed (usually though higher prices or lack of choice).

SpiderMonkey exists and is pretty viable for many use-cases. But, the open source nature of V8 makes it hard to argue that it was really a monopoly. If Google did anything anti-competitive in V8, other developers are free to fork it, revert the change, and distribute that version.

For that I would ask — rhetorically because I don't know the answer — what convinced Google to develop and advertise Chrome in the first place given that by Firefox already existed.

And why they went further and made the core open source: every time I've been around the "we should open source $foo" conversation, the managers have asked, essentially "what's in it for us?"

> what convinced Google to develop and advertise Chrome in the first place given that by Firefox already existed

Firefox wasn't so great back then. Google survives by the Web being great. A free, premiere browser experience means people use the Web.

> every time I've been around the "we should open source $foo" conversation, the managers have asked, essentially "what's in it for us?"

Google overflows with money, so P&L enforcement likely isn't so evident, and they might've just had some engineers saying they wanted to do it that way, and the person with approval power was probably also an engineer.

Firefox was amazing by the time Chrome was released. Google survives by selling advertisements, essentially making the web worse.

> Google survives by selling advertisements, essentially making the web worse.

This seems entirely subjective. I prefer using Lichess to Chess.com, but I would in no way think that Chess.com, with its sponsoring of full-time players, makes the game worse. Advertising-related money goes somewhere and pays for things.

"Firefox was amazing by the time Chrome was released"

Yes but it also frequently ground to a halt trying to multitask tabs. Chrome didn't so we all switched to chrome.

> rhetorically because I don't know the answer

If you have time to edit your comment: there’s a “not” missing (“not rhetorically”)

> And why they went further and made the core open source

Worth noting that Blink is a fork of Webkit, which is a fork of KHTML, which is LGPL-licensed. The engine was always open-source, there was no Google business decision to make the engine open source.

> Having a monopoly isn't illegal

Correct. Antitrust is about monopolization. You can have a monopoly without monopolization, and you can do monopolization without having a monopoly.

For example, suppose there was a small maker of farm implements, Dirty Hoes, and that one of the stores that sold Dirty Hoes hoes was Sneed's Seed and Feed (formerly Chuck's).

Sneed's also sells hoes made by another small company in a small town in Suffolk County New York, Hoes of Babylon.

Dirty Hoes tells Sneed's that unless Sneed's stops selling Hoes of Babylon hoes Dirty Hoes will stop selling to Sneed's.

That could be an antitrust problem of Dirty Hoes, even though they aren't anywhere near having a monopoly, because it could be seen as attempted monopolization.

Microsoft got hit with it because they shipped IE with Windows by default