Recently, the issue of market monopoly by GAFA has been widely discussed on the street -- especially, in the US and Europe in particular.

GAFA refers to the four platformers of Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon.

Well, I think it's true that GAFA actually dominates the market and uses the privileged position of platformer to act as an advantage over retail stores.

Ironically, it was "R", not GAFA, that I learned of the specific example of the "privileged status of platforer".

In January of this year, the retailer's union protested that it would be an 'abuse of a superior position', in response to Rakuten's policy of "free shipping on purchases over a certain amount,

In response to this, the Fair Trade Commission filed a "Petition for Emergency Stay Order against Rakuten" with the Tokyo District Court.

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I have a sense of deja vu -- I think of the mayhem of 1995, when Windows 95 was released.

Subsequently, Microsoft was being sued all over the U.S. and Europe for "monopoly due to the privileged status of the Windows OS".

The "browser (Internet Explorer) bundling problem" was a big one.

In fact, browsers are the tool that rules the world.

Perhaps many people don't realize it, but browsers are now leading the way in "digital technology" rather than the "digital society".

It's "the foundation of scalable real-time digital services" that allow, for example, to display a million objects on a map simultaneously, as well as real-time games.

I'll never forget the impact I had when I tried to program in WASM (Web Assembler) on Mr. S's recommendation.

By the way, this program doesn't work, ironically, only on "Internet Explore".

Most other browsers (Chromo, Firefox, Edge, Safari, etc.) will show it.

However, many companies have adopted Internet Explorer as the basic browser for their business systems, so it is not possible to change this now.

This is a form of so-called "monopoly by OS" (a success story?) .

Aside from that.

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By all accounts, it should be clear that GAFA has a monopoly on the market.

In addition,

"The Government of Japan, which should be Japan's largest service platformer, is losing to Amazon"

It is true.

Of course, even if I know that "such a comparison is unreasonable".

(To be continued)