Another thing the pricing test favored by the Chicago School doesn't consider is the effect of consolidation on entrepreneurship. Huge consolidated companies become de-facto standards that are hard to compete with for many many reasons and that have the resources to simply buy or clone any competitor in its crib. In the computing world they also tend to become platform monopolies with strong lock-in from APIs and network effects. You also get a huge problem with regulatory capture due to the massive budgets these companies have for lobbying and revolving door deals. If the mega-corps get big enough and exist long enough they start to effectively merge with the state.
The price to the consumer might not change a lot, but a lot of innovation doesn't happen when the market gets dominated by players like that.
Back to inequality -- this effect also leads to consolidation of more and more wealth at the top by these companies and to geographic consolidation of wealth in the cities where these monster companies are headquartered or have major operations. Today that's San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, and New York. Due to the "law of rent" this forces up real estate costs in these cities, further making it hard for middle class people to build wealth regardless of where they live. Geographic wealth concentration means you face a choice between poor career prospects and living in a city where the real estate market takes all your surplus due to the natural spatial supply limits (land, commute times) that exist for housing.
Entrepreneurship is a major vehicle for geographic wealth dispersal and for class mobility from the middle class upward. Without entrepreneurship the ranks of the very wealthy become incredibly stagnant and almost like a generational nobility. (Europe has this problem too, though for very different reasons. In Europe the problem is too much cumbersome regulation making it too hard to start new businesses. So Europe has too much government and America has unstoppable mega-corps that crush everything new.)
It's weird to me to see a narrow "pricing approach" towards antitrust being attributed to the Chicago School. I thought the Chicago perspective on antitrust was that it should potentially be applied to markets that aren't "contestable" (i.e. have high barriers to entry) for either structural or regulatory reasons, and in particular, that well-designed regulation could be used in such cases to minimize and constrain the non-contestable portion of a complex, multi-lateral market structure (see e.g. the markets in energy, telcos and the like - IT does not seem all that different), while "carving out" new, more contestable markets that could then sustain a lesser regulatory burden. This seems quite close to the power-focused approach that the "critics" are pursuing, and it's weird that they're being characterized as anti-free-market.
It's possible that as with Keynes' advice about counter-cyclic spending the Chicago school's views on monopoly and antitrust have been distorted by politicians and lobbyists.
In the case of Keynes counter-cyclic spending became "deficits don't matter, always spend more no matter what." In recessions spending goes up and in booms spending goes up. Keynes argued that governments should cut during booms to achieve something at least close to a net balance, but the cutting part is ignored.
The price to the consumer might not change a lot, but a lot of innovation doesn't happen when the market gets dominated by players like that.
Back to inequality -- this effect also leads to consolidation of more and more wealth at the top by these companies and to geographic consolidation of wealth in the cities where these monster companies are headquartered or have major operations. Today that's San Francisco, Seattle, Los Angeles, and New York. Due to the "law of rent" this forces up real estate costs in these cities, further making it hard for middle class people to build wealth regardless of where they live. Geographic wealth concentration means you face a choice between poor career prospects and living in a city where the real estate market takes all your surplus due to the natural spatial supply limits (land, commute times) that exist for housing.
Entrepreneurship is a major vehicle for geographic wealth dispersal and for class mobility from the middle class upward. Without entrepreneurship the ranks of the very wealthy become incredibly stagnant and almost like a generational nobility. (Europe has this problem too, though for very different reasons. In Europe the problem is too much cumbersome regulation making it too hard to start new businesses. So Europe has too much government and America has unstoppable mega-corps that crush everything new.)