WI the De Beers monopoly isn't broken?

The Vulture

Banned
Suppose outside interests in various countries don't manage to create an effective operation and distribution scheme outside the De Beers network, and De Beers maintains their diamond monopoly up into the present? What does this mean for the diamond trade, blood diamonds, and monopolistic business practices?
 
Isn't De Beers still pretty big today? If they don't have a majority of the market under their control, I'd venture a guess that they still retain a pretty sizable percentage.
 
Isn't De Beers still pretty big today? If they don't have a majority of the market under their control, I'd venture a guess that they still retain a pretty sizable percentage.

There's a HUGE difference between "monopoly" and even "majority." Think Microsoft. Back in its heyday, only a decade ago, it completely dominated several software fields. Apple was only a minor player (and it, too, had served as majority leader for a while). Now, it has a much smaller relative size, Apple has overtaken it, and there are several other companies on the verge of overtaking it. It seems Microsoft is largely only hanging on to its massive revenue through inertia; it's too expensive for corporations to switch wholesale over to new hardware with a new OS (and any required software changes). If Microsoft had been a monopoly, if there had been no Apple, no Unix variants, Microsoft would have the final word on the software industry.

Edit: Just checked. De Beers is not even a majority, 40%.
 
So is it sort of like how Microsoft's Internet Explorer dominates something like 60 percent of the browser market, while Firefox, Chrome, etc, control smaller, but still substantial chunks of the market?

I'm aware that a monopoly on a certain commodity is no where near a majority, but I was asking about the state of the diamond market today, not in the sense of the original scenario.

edit: just read your edited post. Seems like we were trying to get at the same point.
 
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