Immortal but you're contradicting yourself. Take a look at this:
immortalfrieza said:
No, they don't have a monopoly because both companies can produce trucks for instance, they just can't sell trucks under each other's brand names. Both companies are able to produce the trucks with their own personal tweeks and sell them for whatever price and at whatever quality they wish, but since both companies can and do sell the same exact product they do not have a monopoly on said product.
Here's where it get interesting. Replace trucks with
Video Game Consoles and you get this:
immortalfrieza said:
No, they don't have a monopoly because both companies can produce Video Game Consoles for instance, they just can't sell Video Game Consoles under each other's brand names. Both companies are able to produce the Video Game Consoles with their own personal tweeks and sell them for whatever price and at whatever quality they wish, but since both companies can and do sell the same exact product they do not have a monopoly on said product.
Now if we assume that both companies refer to say Sony and Microsoft you can see why your argument doesn't hold any water.
You further go on to say
immortalfrieza said:
brand names are themselves technically monopolies, but small, barely noticable ones
This argument too doesn't hold water as a brand name simply identifies the maker of said product. If we think about brands as the names of the company, I'm sure that you could see why you can't pose as another. It would be as if I made something and said that you made it. Not a problem in and of itself, but it becomes problematic when or if I start proclaiming or making things that cast you in a negative light. Going back to the companies, could you imagine if brands weren't protected and Microsoft releases the PS4 and makes it overheat on purpose to smear SONY, or vice-versa. So in short, brands are not monopolies there are identifiers of the maker of a product and are and should be protected.
Now lets take a look at your last argument:
immortalfrieza said:
No, in fact, I have never said that in this entire 3 page long discussion. I said Sony has a monopoly on the PS3, PS Vita and any games that were exclusively produced for it, and if customers want said products they would have no choice but to pay whatever price Sony wants them to and deal with the shoddiness of the products and there's nothing they can do about it. It's not like there's another company out there for consumers to buy from that is legally producing and selling PS3s for cheaper and functioning better, they can't because patent and copyright laws would have them arrested if they tried, THAT is a monopoly. I NEVER said that Sony had a monopoly over the gaming industry itself, just on their products.
See this ties in nicely with my previous point about brand control. No one else can produce a PS3 because is essentially Sony's take on the truck. Some company can produce a similar product with "tweaks" (as per your car analogy), but they can't produce Sony's truck. Now if this company wants to make a ConsoleX 360-3 then more power to them, they just can't produce PS3, or any SONY product and call it that. I would like to bring up a quote you said again here since I think you put it nicely:
immortalfrieza said:
Both companies are able to produce the trucks with their own personal tweeks and sell them for whatever price and at whatever quality they wish, but since both companies can and do sell the same exact product they do not have a monopoly on said product.
So you can see that even you agree that because Sony and Microsoft "can and do sell the same exact product" (bar a few tweeks mentioned earlier) "they do not have a monopoly on said product".
So that's it for now. I hope the long nature of the post didn't scare you away, I tried to keep it pretty concise and organized. I still think that you don't quite understand what a monopoly is and the difference between a monopoly and brand exclusivity, but I'm hoping that the post above might be of some help in clarifying that.