what is a monopoly

i can not believe i actually have to make this blog look i get it people that skew left economically typically don't take ecom and don't understand economics on a basic level but when it comes to this word "monopoly" it's rather well defined and i beg of you to stop using it where it's not applicable cuz when you do it makes you look stup!d so what is a monopoly? well it's simply when 1 (mono) government or company are the only supplier of a product (i probably won't get into the government part of this cuz that's far more complex than a company monopoly) the company with a monopoly will often buy out competitors (which btw is illegal here in the states you can buy competing brands but if you don't have any one you can point to as competition you could be serving time in jail thank rockerfellers attempt at creating a monopoly for that) making it impossible for anyone to challenge the company why this is bad of course is cuz that means that as the sole distributer of a product the company can force the consumer to pay whatever the company wants the consumer to pay for the product it also means the company doesn't have anyone to compete with to improve their product which means as long as you're reliant on netflix for your movies cuz hulu and other competitors dont exzist netflix can choose what you may or may not watch and you won't have any other place to go that offers what netflix doesn't (i find it easiest to talk about this stuff using streaming services as an example it seems) now yes companies regardless of weather or not they have competition do get to chose the quality of their product but with competition that means that you don't have to give them your money for the product cuz you can go to their competitor who aside from having a better product may also have a lower price so to be clear a monopoly means total control of a single market the opposite of a monopoly is competition meaning the market is a shared space forcing prices to go down and product quality to increase lest the competitor risk losing money on said product i wrote a similar blog on this topic about piracy and it's place in the free market and heres the thing i want to note now piracy is also a form of competition which is why companies such as nintendo fight so hard against it (ironically enough sonys attempt to fight it is why emulators are legal) napster was a huge part in pushing the music industry to the digital age for example soon after we would see itunes and zune which appeared to compete against napster if you can put 2 and 2 together what i'm saying is a free market is the only place where competition is allowed to thrive i mentioned before government can have monopiles and one example are governments that run on the communist idea of economics ask a north korean if they're allowed to eat what they grow nope cuz it has to go to the government to be redistributed that's only one example of a government monopoly like i said government monopiles are a more complex topic due to their ability to monopolize things like violence speech and ideas that being said if you know me you've probably seen me mention youtube is a monopoly but wait a minute aren't there youtube competitors? yes and no theres something youtube does their competitors don't that makes them a different product and that is they treat content creators as emploees ... sorta (youtube is an awful boss) what we've seen from youtube competitors like bit chute and vimeo is that it is possible to get people to jump platforms but it's incredibly hard when they don't pay content creators the way youtube does this is something twitch does creators are payed (even if it is through fans and not ads) the thing about twitch as a youtube competitor though is that they don't offer the same product youtube does sure in late youtube has added streaming to their platform but when twitch was considered a youtube competitor youtube was solely a video platform and still thats what people use it for so what makes it a different beast is how attractive it is to get payed as a content creator so youtube is a monopoly not just because of their product but how they distribute their product however this is changing odysee actually does pay content creators however in crypto making it the latest and best attempt to compete with youtube however if it fails that'll mean youtube is still a monopoly but that remains to be seen so i guess for now we can consider it a pseudo monopoly i figured the content of this blog was common knowledge but after seeing someone call microsoft a monopoly which is the furthest thing from the truth i felt i had to wright this blog explaining it so you guys can thank that guy for this really messy over done explanation of a simple concept that most of us understand