What need would there be for such anti trust regulations if they only allowed for organizations that were completely within their purview from the get go and designated To Big To Be Anti-Trusted?

Companies change all the time, that is why antitrust can only regulate what happens right now, instead of regulate what companies guess will be.

Even if they were to regulate beforehand, any company they would allow could evolve slowly into something that breaks the initial idea of what was allowed.

But since said company would be completely under their control and grace ahead of time, they could do whatever they want with it, at anytime, even if it changes or not. No need to go through the regulatory song and dance.

It’s much easier for everyone if you only look for rule violations when someone suspects they’ve been broken, rather than forcing everyone to check with you first before doing anything.

That would be much easier, if the rules in the first place were a static system made available to everyone on real time and understood by all, and the costs of engaging with were proportionally burdensome to all. But its not, though if people seem fine with cat and mouse game between EU regulators looking for quick cash, and Google et al always seeming one step ahead (with no notable improvements people search experience outside more skinner boxes of compliance sprinkled around), then I guess that's what most people want and are ok with… meh

I wouldn’t say “want” so much as “it’s the worst except for all the others”.

Legal systems are like code, except interpreted by humans and “common sense” instead of compilers — we just don’t have a way to make it simultaneously easy to understand (legalese), hacker-proof (legal loopholes), and future-proof (implications of new tech).

Governments do try to clear out old laws and amend the ones they want to keep, but it looks like it’s as hard for them as preventing databases from leaking is for us.