Re:Should digital monopolies be broken up?
by nickik on Friday November 28, 2014 @03:18AM
(#8670096)
If you go a bit deeper and look at the news article from back in the day, some of the most well known journalist that were attacking the 'Robber Barrons' were actually relatives of the companys that were getting crushed.
In the time were the evil Standard Oil gained there monopoly the price of oil was falling consistently, and they were beeing accused of doing price gauging while in reality they were just more productive.
There are tons of other examples, one was the company that invented the cooled train cart so that local butcher were pretty usless. Guess who was attacked as beeing a evil monopolist? Well the company that manged to push down prices.
Its really sad that all the research going into that time is ignored by most econoimst, and they just repeat what they learned in collage.
I'm pretty skeptical of all government antitrust infrastructure for precisely this reason. Why should I expect a government to use its antitrust authority only against actual trusts that threaten consumers or industry (assuming for the moment that those routinely exist), rather than use it to help certain corporations gain market power?
That said, most of my armchair research has centered on the history of antitrust in the USA (I recommend reading Gabriel Kolko for some distilled revisionist history on the topic), and I know little about how it works in Europe and elsewhere.