this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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The harder and more complicated something is the bigger barrier to entry there is to competing against it.
When video games were simple and fit on a single floppy disk or tape - a single person could develop an entire commercially released game. John Romero could make Dangerous Dave in a week or two, by himself.
Now that games are like Grand Theft Auto V they require hundreds of millions of dollars to create with teams of hundreds of people over nearly a decade. The voice acting in motion capture alone cost many many times more than a game would cost to make in the '80s.
The same goes with web browsers. Chromium is open source and free, it works well, so why spend tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to make your own new thing?
What benefit did Microsoft get from spending all that money on EdgeHTML versus just using Chromium? None. That's why they switched to Chromium.
Oh... so to answer your question no one is "allowing" a few tech companies to denominate, just the complexity and cost of creating new products leads to these natural monopolies sort of forming. You're free to spend the tens of millions of dollars to make your own browser if you want to and break up this domination. I doubt you'll do it you'll probably just use Chromium.
And if you were to actually create an innovative or competing product, Google would just buy you out like Android, Waze, Nest, etc
Not on browsers, probably. It's one of the areas where antitrust still has some echoes. They'll probably pay you to stay afloat.
Tech giants are buying everyone left and right because people don't want to pay for these innovative products. Imagine paying a monthly subscription for Waze! Who would do that? Literally no one. Innovative products can't exist without paying customers.