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During standard oils run, the price of kerosene, dropped from 35 cents to 8 cents, and their percentage of the oil market actually decreased significantly long before it was broken up.

https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-standard-oil-was-a-pr...

I read about that a while ago. This raised the question in the back of my mind: did the investors (Rockefeller) actually want Standard Oil to be broken up? As I understand it, it ended up being incredibly profitable for them.

> You could have made the same argument about Standard Oil - until the competition were crushed and prices went up.

Prices didn't go up until the government forced Standard Oil to break up. It had nothing to do with the competition being "crushed"; it had to do with the government taking the attitude you mention, that lower consumer prices didn't matter. Which seems daft since lower consumer prices mean consumers, i.e., the people, are better off.

> Which seems daft since lower consumer prices mean consumers, i.e., the people, are better off.

I don't think that necessarily follows; price is big, but not everything. I don't care how cheap products are on Amazon, I still refuse to buy computer storage or anything that goes in the human body since they are either unwilling or unable to deal with counterfeiting problem.

> I don't care how cheap products are on Amazon, I still refuse to buy computer storage or anything that goes in the human body since they are either unwilling or unable to deal with counterfeiting problem.

Standard Oil didn't have a "counterfeiting problem", so I don't see how this is relevant to them. Or, for that matter, to any other large monopoly that has been broken up by antitrust action.

Also, you as a consumer might judge that, for example, you don't trust Amazon to deliver the product you want in a certain area, regardless of how low the price is. That's fine. But that in itself is no argument for breaking up Amazon in an antitrust action. It's just an argument for not trusting Amazon for certain types of products.

The issue is the consumer harm that comes from the combination of not trusting Amazon to deliver the qualities you care about for a certain class of product and there being no alternative suppliers because Amazon drove them out of business.

It seems like there aren’t any middle-quality products anymore: you can buy a cheap plastic item that never works quite right and will break next month, or you can buy a chrome-plated showpiece item that costs too much. Where’s the non-disposable, ugly, bulletproof utility version these days?

> It seems like there aren’t any middle-quality products anymore

I think there still are, but I agree it's very hard to find any on Amazon, at least in a lot of product categories. You have to spend time trawling actual brick and mortar stores.

The opposite of lower consumer prices not mattering, is lower consumer prices being the only thing that matters. It seems you are suggesting prices are the only thing. The key phrase here is “market power”, not just prices.

==since lower consumer prices mean consumers, i.e., the people, are better off.==

Over what time frame are they better off?

Are workers (also people) better off?

> It seems you are suggesting prices are the only thing.

No, but any supposed other benefits that outweigh prices getting higher are even harder to measure, so basing government intervention on them is even harder to justify.

> Over what time frame are they better off?

Um, whatever time frame the prices are lower?

> Are workers (also people) better off?

If they have to spend less on what they need, it would seem so.

“Things are hard to measure, so we should just focus on what’s easy, regardless of its actual effectiveness” doesn’t seem like a great compromise.

“Spend less on what they need” is same Walmart argument we’ve heard for decades. Meanwhile, the middle class shrinks and many of the things people need to improve their lives (shelter, healthcare, education) get more and more expensive and wages stagnate.

YouTube can screw over content creators with its insane system of copyright strikes. PayPal and Amazon can keep legitimately earned money on the pretext of non-existent ToC violations. Apple can decide to bar you from the App Store on a whim and clean-room your best green shoots ideas into its own products. Google can decide that you earned too much in ad revenue and shut you down just because it can.

The problem is abuse of power without oversight

This is exactly how I feel about me dealing as a business with the big corps. But I did not actually had this experience myself. Reason is simple: I just do not engage. As a business I do not uses any cloudy stuff at all. Everything I do I host either myself or on rented servers that I could change on a moment's notice. No Youtube, no Apple app store, no hosting my software using Azure/Amazon/etc, no Github (I host my own), no Gmail etc.etc.

That's what antitrust protection is really about.

Is it? Or is that what good regulation is for? What if YouTube and their competitors all nerfed and deplatformed popular creators because of advertiser pressures? Isn’t this a better argument for regulation?

Remember that the reason that Bork defined antitrust the way he did was because there wasn’t a methodical definition of where it should be applied in the 60’s, and the govt was arbitrarily interventionist.

Antitrust protection has historical been used by lesser players to hurt their competitors and the public because they have political pull.

When it comes to books, Amazon didn't abuse their power. The big fights were because Amazon wanted to set their own prices in their own store, something that is pretty standard in most markets.

Big giant company that has been undisputed and can use it's power and money to politically influence for positive legislation in it's case == monopoly