Probably a very unpopular opinion, but it seems any time a business/product reaches the point where they have majority of market share, people say it's a monopoly. At what point are businesses forced to scale down because their products are TOO successful? I still don't understand what the big deal was with Microsoft having IE bundled with Windows. If a competitor has a superior product, then why not just leave it up to the consumers to decide if it lives or dies. Imagine an amateur boxer fighting a pro twice their size and saying "it's no fair, they're stronger and have more experience." Well, the pro put in all the work to get to where they're at.
Good question! Speaking in legal terms, not popular usage, generally the problem being addressed is not "you have too much market share," but rather, "you used your dominant position in one market to then dominate a different market." To stretch your analogy, it'd be like your pro boxer entering an amateur tournament and taking all the prize money. In the case of Microsoft's IE bundling, they were using their dominant position in the Operating System market to become dominant in the Web Browser market, by bundling IE with the OS and providing specific OS integration hooks which were unavailable to other browsers.
> If a competitor has a superior product, then why not just leave it up to the consumers to decide if it lives or dies.
The trouble comes when the entity in the dominant position squashes competition unfairly. In the IE case, Microsoft included a browser with every copy of the OS, so consumers had to overcome hurdles to even try a competitor's browser. Additionally, as I mentioned above, Microsoft provided secret hooks into the OS that were unavailable to other browsers, so it was impossible for a competitor to create a superior product. Those actions limited fair competition in the browser space, which usually results in worse outcomes for consumers or the market as a whole, hence the laws forbidding monopoly abuse.
Hope that helps give some idea of what happened there. Of course, you can read much more detail about the case & anti-trust law in general elsewhere.
People start complaining something is a monopoly when the business starts squashing potential competition from the position of power, using bully or shady tactics, or screwing their customers by being more and more greedy.
In case of Microsoft and IE, even if you don't read up on the history and details of it, it's obvious that they were just trying to do what Google is doing now - gatekeep the web and get some of that toll money. I don't think many would have issues with Microsoft just including a simple web browsing tool and leaving it at that. Instead, they were actively working to kill the competition, took over the majority of market share and then just killed off innovation basically completely, and held back the web for years and years afterwards.
I don't really like this boxing analogy (because browsers don't directly interact with each other and browsers aren't a sport, etc), but I'll go with it anyway. When there are only two boxers and nobody apparently cares about the amateur, gloves that fit the amateur stop being made. All boxing gloves produced only fit the pro. But I guess "the pro put in all the work to get to where they're at." Again this analogy doesn't make much sense to begin with, but I think I've made my point about websites being designed exclusively for chrome. I have had websites tell me that my browser is unsupported and promptly refuse to let me use the site until I fake my user agent and then it works perfectly fine.
