• mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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    6 hours ago

    Wow, hopefully we’ll invent some competing way to listen to music in a car.

    But y’know what, sure, my absolute was overreaching.

    Yours still was too.

    Standard Oil never had all the oil. AT&T never had all the phone lines. The worst, most blatantly illegal monopolies had competitors. They were still monopolies. What the word almost always means, does not require 100.0% market share. Shit gets weird well before that.

    • AT&T did have all the phone lines in a given area. They still do. Just like cable. The market isn’t always as broad as the entire world, the entire country, or even an entire state. Comcast has a monopoly in many places by being the only provider of cable service in a lot of places, just as AT&T was the only provider of phone service to a lot of places.