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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 situati
by mbreese 3y ago
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.