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Do you want antitrust investigations? Because this is how you get antitrust investigations.

Wordpress is nearly half of the Internet. There’s a pretty compelling argument that Matt is using his market power to prevent competition in violation of the Sherman act.

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I mentioned this deeper in the comment chain, but WordPress the OSS software is used by a lot of people. But there are many WordPress hosting companies, so no single legal entity would come anywhere close to a monopoly.

By that logic, Linux has a monopoly on cloud web servers or something? But there’s no one company making that happen.

Thought experiment: Linus is hired by Canonical, adds Ubuntu's kernel live-patching to the kernel itself and removes kexec from the public API surface. Or we pretend it never existed in the first place, and requests and patches to add it are ignored (quite common in commercial open source).

I know there's an extra layer in the WordPress situation, because Matt personally owns wordpress.org, but he very evidently uses that position to further the goals of Automattic.

People have asked for a way to host all the wordpress.org online services themselves. There isn't even a way to configure a different endpoint. I'm sure that'll change after today, in WordPress itself, or in a fork.

Nearly half isn't enough to trigger antitrust. Especially because that nearly half is only mom and pop shops and not the ones doing the real big business. So I wouldn't be too worried about that.

Mom and pop are the consumers/victims here. And if 46% of all websites are WordPress, it’s probably likely that it has a monopoly on sites in its domain (e.g. blogging, commerce)

But nobody cares about blogging. At least not of the population block that not about to die off. Stories/Reels/meh are where attention is at now. Commerce? If it's not Amazon, it's nothing. After that for mom&pop shops would be Shopify/Etsy/otherNotSmallSites. Maybe FB Marketplace, Insta/TikTok type sales too. I honestly would be surprised if mom&pops are getting much from their own websites in today's world.

It's not just blogging. For example, the Whitehouse uses WordPress for its site. Nasa uses it on some of their sites as does the National Archives. On the commercial side you have The New Yorker, BBC America, Sony, Disney, Facebook and Bloomberg all using it in some capacity. There are many more of course, but that should give you an idea.

So, while you're right - online publishing doesn't have popular mindshare - it is a massive part of the online economy.

I'm not saying that qualifies WP for anti-trust investigation, but your underlying premise that WordPress is irrelevant is not congruent with reality.

I’ve worked on a good number of WordPress sites for several Very Big Companies and not one of them was a blog in any sense.

From an internal tablet tool for sales reps, to the entire help system for an MS product that got translated into iirc about 100 languages, to a shareable library of B2B solutions, I’ve not once worked on a WP project that was a blog.

I don’t see how that’s even remotely possible. There are so many WP competitors it’s not even funny. Being OSS, it’s very easy to export your data from WordPress. So you could easily move from one of Matt’s hosting companies to somewhere else (or self host!) if that was important.

For competitors, on the small scale side, you have Wix/Squarespaxe/Weebly. Or just Shopify for e-commerce. For enterprise, Adobe experience manager is huge. Loads of places just write their own website and have their own CMS solution.

So no, it doesn’t even come close to having a monopoly on anything. And even if WordPress did, no individual company does. There are a huge number of different companies competing in the WordPress hosting space. Automattic doesn’t even host that much (https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/ho-automattic)

It probably depends on which part of the Sherman act we are talking about.

Section 2, which covers "Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce [...]" has been found by courts, I believe, to require 50% market share (or sometimes more) to apply.

But section 1, which applies to "Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce [...]", does not as far as I've been able to tell have any market size threshold.

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