Instead of focusing on consumer welfare, antitrust law should focus on 'anticompetitive behavior'. In this argument, amazon is the platform through which all other online sellers go to market, like railroads in the late 19th century. Behaving as both a platform and participant is anticompetitive, regardless of whether programs like 'amazon basics' make consumers happy.
NYT article about the author of the original law paper https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/07/technology/monopoly-antit...
I don't have strong feelings on the issue, but this may help explain warren's stance, which isn't directly related to consumer choice.
I Don't agree with this view. It surely has the potential to hurt the consumers in the future but IF and WHEN it does consumer impact at that time can be used to fight it (break up etc). No need to actually hurt the consumer NOW for the fear that they might be hurt in the future.
The way that the 'consumer welfare' protection is currently implemented has no teeth.
Consider the Comcast/TWC mergers. The companies involved pay 'experts' (Of their choice) to spin fairy tales about how they project that costs to customers will go down. Five years down the road, when they don't (Or, customers suffer because other intangibles degrade, due to lack of competition), nobody actually holds them accountable, after the fact.
Well, sure, 100% national market share is obviously a monopoly. But you're also a monopoly if you distort a market (generally markets with less than 3 major players) or have control or distortion over individual markets (you can have a monopoly in NYC but not the US, for example).
I think this obviously applies to telecoms, which often have monopolies over certain areas (and often granted by local government! thanks a lot Philly city council).
I think there's a whole host of bad behavior that's non-monopolistic. That's what I think needs to be cracked down on. Some of these do relate to market share, but I don't think it's as simple as a boolean monopoly / not-monopoly. It's a gradient, and much of the behavior in that gradient should be dealt with. There's often collusion between companies on pricing, or agreements not to compete, etc...
That's a key distinction. Are there any actual monopolies (I don't mean companies that are merely dominant) that are not backed by government?
Let's clear up what we're talking about. I don't find monopolies to be a very interesting subject.
What I have a problem with is anticompetitive behavior (which is illegal but the US has been notably slacking on enforcement for years). When a company uses their position as a platform for sales to start pushing into selling actual products in markets they've determined to be profitable, or a company bundles their applications with their mobile platform thereby dominating the app market, or when a company runs the largest platform for search but simultaneously distorts it through advertising and mysterious delisting or account shutdowns, then you have problems. These companies are anti-competitively distorting markets in ways that consumers can't understand and requires regulation.
There are two ways tech companies are often uncompetitive. Predatory or below cost-pricing, https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a... is first among them. Think Uber, where they lose money each ride. "Free" services also seem like they violate this, as they prevent anyone from competing in that market. You can't sell private email services so long as free email exists. App and service bundling falls under the other condition, https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a.... Mysterious delisting or shutting down accounts without reason or recourse falls under refusal to deal, https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/competition-guidance/guide-a....
It's only kinda choice. They have such a dominance over the social graph, most people who "leave" them don't actually completely leave. Most of them keep Facebook around as an address-book+messaging. People who "leave" by actually deleting their account then turn around and create obvious dummy accounts.
To be fair, I think there is some argument that some of the larger tech giants would benefit consumer welfare by being broken up. Facebook probably less so since people already have choice.
Warren does herself no favors by using $25 billion as the threshold of a monopoly. What a real monopoly is is when there is no consumer choice at all, leading to large corporate profits that hurt consumers at the pricing level.
By not using consumer choice or harm as the standard (which is what the court uses), Warren comes across (and perhaps actually intends) to be against large companies, regardless of welfare.