> It also didn't make any sense they dropped XMPP in favour of Hangouts.
It makes perfect sense. Forcing out competitors (XMPP) with leverage from dominance in a neighboring market (gmail, which was the common interface for GTalk) is a textbook example of monopolization.
If we lived in a world that actually cared about the rule of law, Google would be charged for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act (and/or related antitrust acts).
I didn't say anything about other players in the "chat" market.
> Google at some point monopolized the "instant messenger"
No, the have dominance in the email market (I mentioned gmail). They used the position of power in the email market to limit XMPP and support their new Hangouts service.
Just like Microsoft used to do, Google broke their support of the protocol. While most of the protocol still worked, they started dropping auth requests on the floor. This wasn't an error message or missing feature; their S2S protocol simply dropped auth requests so it looked from the outside that the request was delivered, but the person on the other end never responded. Outgoing (from gmail) auth requests were removed entirely. From the perspective of gmail users, XMPP popularity simply faded and Hangouts took over as a replacement.
Using one market (gmail) as leverage in another market (chat) is basically the definition of monopolization. Note that this doesn't require a perfect monopoly in the first market; ability to force/manipulate the market is sufficient. Additionally, the Sherman Antitrust Act also criminalizes the attempt to monopolize.
> Not to mention that XMPP is a standard
Obviously. I've been following the development from the beginning (before it was called "jabber"; the name "XMPP" happened many years later).
> not a competitor.
An open (federated) protocol is the most dangerous kind of competitor to a big company like Google. Deals/contracts can can be made with a company, but a federated protocol by definition cannot be controlled by a single entity.
> This is like saying that modern companies are monopolizing against SOAP or YAML.
I think you need to re-read what I said. Or maybe read more about how antitrust law works.
In the timeframe you're talking of, Gmail was a distant third in webmail and even further down the list if you considered all email clients. I don't know where the threshold of "dominance" is, but I refuse to believe it's at 5% market share.
>Using one market (gmail) as leverage in another market (chat) is basically the definition of monopolization
No its not. Unless you're claiming that this is a form of product tying, but that would require that
1. Gmail held a monopoly or near monopoly over the email market at the time
2. hangouts was a service that people needed (or that to use gmail, you also were forced to use hangouts)
> note that this doesn't require a perfect monopoly in the first market
There's no such thing, that's a strawman to permit calling things monopolies when they aren't. Given that Google allegedly tried to act like a monopoly and totally failed, I suggest that you rethink your view.
> An open (federated) protocol is the most dangerous kind of competitor to a big company like Google.
You mean protocols like SMTP and HTTPS, protocols which are core to Google's business? This was not a company with a monopoly in one area leveraging it to gain advantage in another. Google was not even close to a monopoly (or even a plurality) in email; Yahoo for one had more users at the time than Gmail.
This was Google admitting that open wasn't working and going private to try and retain existing users. Which, not having anything close to a monopoly, was perfectly legal. One could even argue it was their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to try and grow the user base.
It makes perfect sense. Forcing out competitors (XMPP) with leverage from dominance in a neighboring market (gmail, which was the common interface for GTalk) is a textbook example of monopolization.
If we lived in a world that actually cared about the rule of law, Google would be charged for violating the Sherman Antitrust Act (and/or related antitrust acts).