What do you mean "You're not supposed to"? Is there some law that forbids this? From my (potentially naive) POV this seems to be roughly equivalent to asking physics professors to stay away from mathematics since they are likely to have some relevant cross-domain expertise.
<<<The Sherman Act outlaws "every contract, combination, or conspiracy in restraint of trade," and any "monopolization, attempted monopolization, or conspiracy or combination to monopolize." >>>
I know lots of people here don't like it, but it is the law and that was the question; "this" in parent clearly meant "use dominance in one market to gain dominance in another" in grandparent, regardless of whether that's actually the central issue here or not.
it only runs afowl of antitrust laws if it solidifies an unfair monopoly and/or uses market position as a monopoly holder to prevent fair competition from emerging.
most monopolies are completely legal. small town with only one gas station or one grocery store? 100% monopoly, 100% legal.
there are plenty of alternatives to github, paid, free, as a service, and self-hosted. GitHub has a large market share, but no monopoly.
This would, of course, need to be determined in court. Microsoft argued it had plenty of competition when the DOJ came for it over Windows and bundling. Like I said, this isn't unexplored territory for Microsoft. This is the company of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish and the Halloween documents.
This isn't a company with plenty of goodwill in its sails launching a hip new product. They're not Do No Evil era Google or Apple riding high on the iPod. We can't just pretend there isn't a history.
Microsoft got done because they were threatening vendors with punitive action if they didn't bundle Windows and IE by default.
Which is to say: Microsoft was taking specific action which wasn't a natural consequence of their software, but was being actively enforced to keep out competition. Vendors didn't organically discover consumers weren't interested in getting a PC without Windows and IE, they were prevented from even offering the option lest they be completely denied the ability to offer that at all.
you're making a big assumption here, that Microsoft did not learn from their mistakes.
I posit that they have indeed learned from their mistakes.
1) They train Copilot with repos hosted on github.com. 2) Users who upload code to github.com grant GitHub an explicit license[0] granting GitHub the right to show that code to others. 3) GitHub do not specify which technologies or techniques they may use to show this code to others, meaning they may use any technique they like.
Microsoft have learned. And they have covered their collective asses. Users who host code on github.com agreed to these terms.
Users who don't like their code showing up in Copilot should not be hosting their code on GitHub, because they agreed to have their code delivered to others when they signed up.
> This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell Your Content. It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use Your Content outside of our provision of the Service[...]
I imagine the crux of this case will be what constitutes "the Service", and whether that includes Copilot. Also whether licensing Copilot counts as selling Your Content.
"Github likely does have what would be considered a monopoly marketshare"
Citation needed. I'm interested to know of examples of how they have stifled competitors. AFAIK Gitlab came of age well after Github had already grown super-large. If Github could have killed Gitlab, wouldn't they have done so?
That is also excluding Azure, Bitbucket, AWS and the plethora of other git repository hosting companies and services. AFAIK, gitlab has more payed (AKA, private or premium) customers than does Github (though I lack a citation there, but that was my understanding when researching this a couple years ago on where to host a private companies code. My take-away then was that Gitlab is actually more popular amongst private companies and Github is more popular for open source projects).
What would be considered Monopoly marketshare? I would suggest that Facebook, Twitter and Amazon have monopolies. If you get shut down as an Amazon seller, that can be 90% of your revenue. Given so many people can leave, and have left Github voluntarily, is implicit evidence that there are very decent alternatives (if not, there would be no alternative and you would be forced to stay with Github for lack of alternatives. That is not the case though, it's easy to just go over to Gitlab. From my perspective, I have no idea how Github can kill Gitlab, I'm curious if there is a vector where Github could use it's network effects to diminish Gitlab, as a specific example. So, how could Github do that?)
maybe, but it is only an illegal monopoly if they are using their monopoly position to prevent others from entering the market.
they are not threatening to block access to github.com for all Comcast users if Comcast chooses not to block access to gitlab.com, for example. That would be an illegal activity for a monopoly. simply existing as a monopoly is not itself illegal.
