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A comment on Ask HN: Why has no one replaced Ticketmaster?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Why has no one replaced Ticketmaster? by kelseyfrog on Friday October 20, 2023 @09:54PM (#37963407)
Anti-trust (at least to me) has a connotation with trust-busting and splitting up companies, but I'd be interested in the ramifications of restricting Ticketmaster to creating contracts no longer than, say, 6 months.

On one hand, free markets involve sellers and buyers coming together freely which exclusivity contracts prohibit, but on the other hand exclusivity contracts are nominally voluntary agreements which is a free exchange. Perhaps free-exchange simply isn't a useful framing here.

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Re:Ask HN: Why has no one replaced Ticketmaster? by TT2048 on Saturday October 21, 2023 @03:44AM (#37964891)
This could be a headache for venues. The financial arbitrage is too good for them, they have almost zero risk of having their venue empty.
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Re:Ask HN: Why has no one replaced Ticketmaster? by trollied on Saturday October 21, 2023 @03:58AM (#37964956)
6 months would not make sense, when people routinely buy tickets for concerts 12-18 months out.
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Re:Ask HN: Why has no one replaced Ticketmaster? by willis936 on Saturday October 21, 2023 @06:28AM (#37965595)
Trust busting exists for this very case. Shorter contracts would solve nothing because the market is as far from free as it can be and the one in charge has no interest in changing that.
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Re:Ask HN: Why has no one replaced Ticketmaster? by hfhdjdks on Saturday October 21, 2023 @07:21AM (#37965885)
The busting and splitting up is a hard tool, but anti-trust has many other tools at their disposal, including maintaining status quo (i.e. refusing the merge of two companies). Disclaimer: I don't work in the US, so I'm not sure if anti-trust there is heavily biased there to this heavy duty tool, but I do know they have plenty of other tools
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