That doesn't matter. If a race car driver sabotages his opponents car, and his opponent slips on a banana peel on his way to the car and can't compete, the sabotage still happened and is still a violation of the rules.
No, that was listed as a result. What was argued is Sony's exclusive agreements to keep games off Xbox, it's newly defined market position, and clauses in a trade agreement that went into effect in 2020 that prohibit the behavior Sony is alleged to be engaging in.
That's because the trade deal the US signed with Japan after the US withdrew from a unilateral deal (The TPP) with most of Asia and Australia was half baked. It was much more narrow in scope covering just agriculture and digital goods (TPP included automobiles and more), and it being only with Japan prevented the US and those smaller Asian companies from putting trade pressure on China, which was probably the point of TPP in the first place. TBH I don't know if TPP would have included similar language, but I'm doubtful that it would have opened the door for this type of application of the rules. Not only would other participants have an interest in preventing abuse of the rules, the TPP was a single agreement while the deal the US/Japan have now is separate - the agriculture deal and the digital goods deal are actually 2 independent agreements. So if there can't be a resolution IRT new trade negotiations and it only affects the digital goods deal then it won't incur loses in agriculture. There is less motivation to keep that digital trade deal alive.
Only thing is, there is no sabotage, just bad driving.
That is not the accusation put forth by lawmakers. To be clear, I'm not passing judgement here, only presenting analogies to explain the situation.
We know what lawmakers claim, but their claims appear anecdotal and unsabstantiated based on the evidence we have currently, unless Sony put other practices we are not aware of
This was okay until the FTC and others changed the definition
It won't because the legal powers that allow regulators to intercede are limited to circumstances related to mergers, acquisitions and investment or where one company has a legally-defined monopoly. If there is any change in legislation then Microsoft will come under pressure (again) on Windows long before any regulator is looking at Nintendo or Sony in the videogame console space, which is a tiny market compared to desktop operating systems that are now - at this point - tried to three dominant cloud/server providers of which Microsoft is also one.
I don't see how it can seeing as cross-licensing deals are commonplace everywhere. From 2nd party content for Netflix to McDonald's having exclusive Disney toy giveaways, content tied to products and services is a universal and well tolerated business practice. It can only be an issue if one company becomes so large they can exclude others from competing fairly and thus maintain/extend a monopoly, which is an issue of monopolies, not exclusivity deals.
