only if walmart and ISPs are a monopoly, which by very technical legal arguments, they're not.

having to pay off ISPs to the tune of millions for network access to e-commerce customers, prevents Amazon from ever getting started selling books in the 90s

>only if walmart and ISPs are a monopoly

This is false. Under US antitrust law, /monopolistic behavior/ (that is, behavior that tends to create monopolies), e.g. predatory pricing and very large mergers, is what's generally regulated. It's not actually illegal to be a monopoly per se, and you don't have to be a monopoly to fall afoul of antitrust law.

right but typically the company has to be close to a monopoly for the federal gov't to scrutinize their actions. and the bureaucratic/legal bar for monopoly has been contorted quite far from the common sense one, especially in the case of ISPs.

WRT antitrust, what’s generally regulated these days is nothing, nada, zilch.

I wonder if immigration hardliners feel the same way about lack of enforcement at the border.

They sure do, but that doesn't make it any more true.

"Assuming that the estimates are correct, got aways have fallen significantly since 2006. In that year, Border Patrol estimated over 600,000 aliens successfully crossed the border and evaded USBP. By 2011, that number had evened out to just under 100,000, where it has remained until today."

https://cis.org/Huennekens/Enforcement-Estimates-DHS

Plus hardliners are very much disputing that some refugees are fleeing from real danger.

> only if ... ISPs are a monopoly,

This is already the case.

Google's inability to push fiber everywhere shows the market is demonstrably closed. It's so cost ineffective due to corruption and in-place infrastructure, that it's an effective monopoly. This is why I have between 0-2 providers to choose from, depending on where I go in the US.

the technicalities I was referring to is that the federal anti-trust laws have been interpreted (contorted) to disregard regional monopolies. If Verizon, ATT & Comcast each own 30% of the national market, non-overlapping regions, even if customers in those regions have zero choice of broadband provider, the ISPs are not technically a monopoly in terms of regulations that can be applied.

Another problem is that anti-trust law does not really regard for speed/quality/cost of service for internet. If your home is served for internet by Comcast at 50 Mbps or ATT DSL at 1Mbps or expensive high-latency satellite at 3 Mbps, well that's not a monopoly even though Comcast is really your only choice for what is socially considered a normal internet speed.

it seems like that's reasonable. It shouldn't be up to the federal government to regulate regional monopolies, it should be up to the state governments.

> only if walmart and ISPs are a monopoly, which by very technical legal arguments, they're not.

And if the regulatory climate of the US was to enforce this sort of regs, which it isn't.

When Amazon first got started, Walmart wouldn't have had to buy ecommerce traffic - everyone back then was spending millions of dollars to appear on AOL and Yahoo.

Even now, the ISPs aren't the companies that businesses have to worry about. Most small internet based businesses are far more beholden to Facebook, Google, Amazon, or Apple for their livelihood.

>Isn't this covered by anti-trust laws?

have you seen any enforcement of anti trust laws lately?

No. Why would you think it is? Could you point to post-1980 precedent?

It doesn't follow that because there haven't been any large trust-busting actions since 1980's that the laws don't still cover the behavior.