In the US, there are two major areas of antitrust law and enforcement:
1) Sherman & Clayton Acts (1890, 1914) - outlaws cartels and anticompetitive activities (that is, activities that tend to lead to monopolies, but doesn't outlaw monopolies themselves). Price gouging is not an antitrust issue, but predatory pricing and price fixing are (you might have meant these terms). This area is primarily established via case law and enforced by the courts (and DOJ AD).
2) Merger guidelines/Federal Trade Commission (1968) - wherein key mergers must be reviewed and approved by the FTC. This area is more sensitive to political climate / executive branch as it's executive-appointed FTC regulators who set the guidelines and give approvals. We are now exiting an era of historic hands-off-ness.
Source: had a professor who is famous in antitrust world
If you can't do that, then you're basically just preventing a monopoly from happening in advance, right? Or trying to at least.
At any rate, I'm assuming US vs. Google will be required to reference precedent set in Sherman & Clayton + subsequent court rulings and _not_ be able to use their own mergers against them as they were approved by the FTC in the first place. Is that also correct?
As far as governments go, we could all become anarchists be done with them, but if you think for even a few seconds about it you would realize that this enormous vacuum of power would be filled by something. Corporations, rival nations with their government still intact, military warlords, or new political factions seeking to establish new governments. We have thousands of years of history that shows this pattern emerging again and again to the point that it is practically a natural law of power. The only check on power is greater or equal power. Ideally, you want this power to be answerable to the greatest number of people that this power is intended to serve. You may recall a lot of smart people during something called the Enlightenment spending a lot of time and energy on experimenting with different forms of government that met these criteria and still managing to not quite get it right. Many people in the West live in societies multiple iterations down the line from those established in the 18th and 19th century revolutions and there are still glaring issues. What do you suggest instead?
You have a say in your government's leadership. Don't like the President? Vote them out. Don't like Zuck? Nothing you can do about it.
Corporations are also accountable to governments, as this story illustrates. If US courts and/or legislators decide they want it, Google ceases to exist.
Economists think of this in terms of "Exit vs Voice".
With governments, you have a voice - one vote for deciding who's in charge - but no way to exit, even when your side loses.
With corporations you can exit - stop shopping at Target - but no voice in how Target is run.
Both models have pros and cons, and it's good to understand how they differ, and what situations they're suited for.
Basically - how do I exit a company if I'm not the one choosing to use their services?
I cannot use the internet and avoid Google's ads.
I cannot use the internet and avoid Amazon's hosting.
I cannot exit the internet because I literally make my living with it, the competitive disadvantage of doing so is SO great with the way we've structured services and life in general that it doesn't really work.
One wouldn't be allowed to use iphone or android? It would take a lot of manual data entry to migrate my accounts off gmail. Youtube obviously wouldn't be allowed but do I get to use adsense powered websites?
Philip Pettit has spent extensive time addressing really interesting questions like these, like what might distinguish "public" domination from "private."
I don't know if or how this fits within actual antitrust law, but it makes sense that the issue was never price gouging, the issue was one entity gaining too much power.
In a theoretical dystopian future, a megacorp could own 99% of market share of all industries in the country, but intentionally offer very low prices on every product to avoid "monopoly" concerns. It becomes clear: monopolistic pricing is just a symptom, not the real issue. The real issue is power.
If this suit (and followup suits on other megacorps) fail, the future may call for new laws to define monopolistic power in novel ways, as soon as we the people recognize that getting search and email and social media for free doesn't mean that the megacorps are on our side.