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A monopoly is fine if it doesn’t hamper competition and doesn’t use its position to impact unrelated markets. Shimano has a near monopoly on bike parts, and it

• robbedpeter 5y ago
  Context matters. With the intellectual property situation as bad as it is right now, the monopolies those companies hold give them a nearly unbeatable advantage in squashing competition. Their IP holdings let them immediately tangle up any new businesses with massive legal hurdles, regardless of the merits of their claims. DJI being in China means they will lie, cheat, and steal from competitors such that meaningful competition becomes impossible. Innovation and consumer value suffer. Monopolies automatically and unavoidably hamper competition and have secondary impacts on unrelated products through inflation of pricing, e.g. if a cog is overpriced it's taking spending away from other markets. Corporations are not people, they are constructs that act toward to goal of self preservation at any cost. Once they exceed a certain size, individual humans in the loop lose meaningful control over the behavior of the company as a whole. The international legal situation we find ourselves in automatically places Chinese companies outside the reach of accountability to any rules by which most of the rest of the world have to abide. By themselves, monopolies could be functional participants in a healthy economy, but there are too many factors making that position completely untenable right now.