"Antitrust" is just lawyer-talk for winning strategies that we later arbitrarily decide is not good for capitalism.
They weren't a bunch of gremlins in a cave conspiring to commit "anti-trust violations" in 2005. They were smart as hell and invested in the right areas.
Microsoft would get hit with the same anti-trust Google is being hit with if Bing and Windows Phone were successful - they're getting away with it because they're terrible.
Anti Trust is not lawyer speak for winning strategies. It’s a specific term, and theres a time and place to use it. Anti trust is what people, especially programmers, have been saying from time immemorial when these firms became this big.
Inefficient markets are bad for humans and are bad markets. The allocate resources inefficiently. The google graveyard is (arguably) a case in point.
The reason Khan reached the FTC was because her thesis at college, made the case that amazon’s actions reduced customer welfare. A fact that was covered here, on HN. This isn’t something a community notices unless it matters to them.
> They weren't a bunch of gremlins in a cave conspiring to commit "anti-trust violations" in 2005. They were smart as hell and invested in the right areas.
You seem to possess the (very common) misconception that monopolies are illegal. They are not. Rather, it is illegal to intentionally use one's monopolistic position to make it difficult or impossible for others to compete.
Winning for who? Not for society as a whole, that's certain.
To put it in money terms so even you can understand it, how much time has been wasted globally because Google is peddling ads and spam sites instead of pointing people to useful results?
Is that free? We should substract it from the GDP calculations if you ask me...
The meaning of “antitrust” is very clearly defined. You’re allowed not to like it or to think that laws against it should be struck down, or whatever, but you can’t say it’s something it’s not.
Certainly, when a law that wasn’t applied begins to be applied again, I can see certain mental models taking issue with that. Regardless, the law and its historical application and consequences didn’t change, only a politically driven low enforcement period. That was the anomaly.
If you allow one company to achieve market dominance, it suffocates the ecosystem and stifles evolutionary growth pressures. It's concentrated malinvestment into a local maxima that salts the playing field so thoroughly that escape velocity is unattainable by anyone else.
There are models of this. And historical anecdotes and evidence.
They weren't a bunch of gremlins in a cave conspiring to commit "anti-trust violations" in 2005. They were smart as hell and invested in the right areas.
Microsoft would get hit with the same anti-trust Google is being hit with if Bing and Windows Phone were successful - they're getting away with it because they're terrible.