The Monopoly Strategy Behind the Google and Microsoft Mobile Patent Wars

The victory condition isn’t highest profits, it’s market dominance

Cory Doctorow
Marker
Published in
4 min readOct 20, 2021

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Two tough guy caricatures brandish clubs at one another; one wears a lapel badge with the Google logo; the other bears a badge with Microsoft’s. Between them is an open treasure chest, with the logos for Novell, Nortel and Motorola sticking out of it. In the background is a desaturated, blurred, low-contrast field of cellular masts.”

Capital-as-power, a framework from Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, holds that companies don’t seek to be as profitable as possible — but rather to accumulate as much power as possible. A company doesn’t seek to be as big as…

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Cory Doctorow
Marker

Writer, blogger, activist. Blog: https://pluralistic.net; Mailing list: https://pluralistic.net/plura-list; Mastodon: @pluralistic@mamot.fr