Antitrust
Question for the room: Has there ever been a case where a monopoly was broken up, when said monopoly wasn’t already actively losing market share?
This isn’t an idle question: All the famous cases seem to involve “monopolies” who were actively in the process of increasing failure at satisfying the central definition of a monopoly.
Standard Oil had been losing market share for years before antitrust suits were brought against it. The same is true of Google, today.
Antitrust suits are never brought when the companies are actually in a position of power - which, if you think about it, makes a kind of sense. A company in a position of power is in a position to effectively fight back.
It’s exactly when they’ve -lost- the power they are alleged to have, that the allegations of having, and abusing, that power are brought.
Now, it wouldn’t surprise me if a large part of this wasn’t “Companies actively losing market share employ dirtier tactics than those that are ascendant” - that is, Google doesn’t abuse its market share while it is rising to become, or being, a monopoly, because it doesn’t need to. The misbehavior is a desperate attempt to hold onto power that is actively slipping away. Does the misbehavior work? Doesn’t seem to.
Alternatively, it holds onto that market share until it tries to abuse it, at which point it begins losing it.
In either framing, it seems reasonably clear that antitrust laws mostly serve to accelerate a process that is already underway; in effect, they are less about destroying functional companies, and more like putting a dying company out of its misery faster.
Possibly, in the process, preserving part of these companies, by splitting a dying company up, and letting the functional parts of a company survive and thrive on their own.
Do shareholders benefit from antitrust suits? Responses on Quora seems to think the answer is “Yes”. This seems plausible to me.
At any rate, I don’t see antitrust suits as a deadly threat to free market economics - nor do I see them as particularly effective tools for fighting monopolies.