New internal documents show tech giants pushing out competitors
politico.com
politico.com
I think the biggest mistake was framing antitrust law as being whether a company harmed consumers. Amazon, well, its reduced prices like crazy and brought lots of competitive products out, so how does it harm consumers by that definition? It's hard to prove. If antitrust law was instead framed as preventing companies from making it inordinately difficult to compete with them, as well as companies with dominance expanding outside of a core market (like Amazon expanding from bookselling to Amazon Basics), then we'd have a stronger definition.
Amazon using data from its own marketplace to know what "Amazon Basics" to produce is one example, Apple being able to use private APIs other applications in the App Store cannot use is another.
If firm gets to powerful they can do anticompetitive things that make the American economic system run by powerful oligarchs instead of a more democratic free market.
Capital tends to concentrate so regulation is needed to keep the free market system intact. In other words an economy run by monopolies isn’t a free market.