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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jdvn1" data-source="post: 3143945" data-attributes="member: 26424">"Monopoly" is an economic term, not a political term. Is there another rule I'm missing?A monopoly can constitute only 85% or 90% of the market. There's no hard-and-fast rule saying it has to be 100%. If it were a handful (2-25 or therebouts) of firms that combined for 50% to 90% of the market, then it'd be an oligopoly market.Well, that's why, from a historical standpoint (I'm trying to keep politics out of this) the government has blocked mergers in the auto industry, in the telecommunications industry, in the software industry... all over the place. The government, according to economics, is supposed to prevent mergers in oligopolies in order to prevent one company from having too large of a market share and becoming a monopoly.Whether such a merger should be blocked in this scenario is either a political argument or an economic argument, so I'll just avoid that. The PDF retail market, anyway, is a tiny market, so it's kind of a grey area.</blockquote>