Comment by lkrubner
2 years ago
It's been many decades since the USA government attempted to go after a vertical trust. During my lifetime, almost all anti-monopoly action has been against horizontal trusts: companies that gain too much market share for some particular product or service. But there was a time, a long time ago, almost a century ago, when it was common for the government to do this kind of thing, for the benefit of the consumer.
There's also a pretty large econ literature questioning that it actually benefited the consumer, much of which concludes that in cases where the trust's anticompetitive power didn't itself rest on government-granted monopolies, it probably hurt.
You know all the incredible inventions that came out of Bell Labs (eg the telephone, the transistor, the C programming language)?
Yup, all those happened when they were an uber-monopoly and had the resources and breathing space to fund such bets!
That's because the government's definition of anti-competitive is ticky-tacky and is rooted in bullshit.
US anti-competitive policy and enforcement has always been dancing around the double standards of who can do market manipulation, the double standards of white collar crime enforcement, the double standards of "consumer benefit" in a capitalist system, etc.
"Consumer benefit" for example is a cowardly way to say price controls. Consumer benefit is inversely correlated with price. That implies the US government should be doing price controls and setting acceptable profit margins for everyone, but in practice due to the enforcement issues and the way the law is constructed it means that the government regulates prices only in extremely detailed technical cases.
Meaning you can manipulate consumer benefit AKA prices AKA extract profits all you want as long as you don't get into these narrowly defined, often unenforced technical cases.
In fact all of these charges or facsimiles of them existed in different forms 10 years ago, they were there on launch 15 years ago. Apple is being sued now simply because other large powerful interests like Epic games, don't like the revenue split rules on the App store.
Most of these laws are written not as regulations, but ways not to regulate.
Well, price controls really are bad, actually. But Lina Khan does seem to want to push FTC governance into that realm.
8 replies →
I think Kodak fits what you describe, and it was decided in 1992.[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_Kodak_Co._v._Image_Tec....
Just here to point out that was 32 years ago. This could definitely fit within someone's lifetime, even more into someone's memory.