So you know what's awesome about doing business and breaking all the rules to get to the top?
The government doesn't want to actually debilitate you in an antitrust lawsuit because it could ironically make the nearest competitor a monopoly when your business implodes. Whoopsie! Although monopolies themselves are not illegal as long as anticompetitive practices aren't deployed, the state is still trying to promote competition, and is keen to avoid causing it themselves.
Breaking rules is tight!
There is a book on this reality if you want to read more.
> government doesn't want to actually debilitate you in an antitrust lawsuit because it could ironically make the nearest competitor a monopoly when your business implodes
The government isn't a monolith. There are promising political careers in store for those who crack these eggs. That's a powerful incentive.
The Department of Justice is the only federal enforcement agency with teeth. It is effectively a monolith.
The FTC and SEC only refer and can sometimes come in with fines and administrative remedies but they are easier to defeat. DOJ can get fines as part of a criminal suit.
The states are whatever.
The new EU can be interesting though. Best of luck to them.
But in the US it is clear what is going to happen and why.
Not sure if this is sarcasm. The article is about a suit, brought by state attorneys general, seeking to break up these companies. That’s plenty toothsome.
It isn't sarcasm, good luck to those states. They are trying to act as a parallel union of states because the national government does not serve their interests and as individual states they are completely ignorable.
Spoiler alert? Because my point is that its the only way for states to matter and there is an irony that the federal government - derived from the states and representing them - is basically a parallel country with the same overlapping geographic boundaries.
The state attorneys general extracted hundreds of billions from Big Tobacco as a result of the Master Settlement Agreement.
Sorry, but the states are hardly "whatever."
The EU on the other hand levies pitiful fines repeatedly, and nothing changes. Then, at the same time they pass rules like GDPR, which disproportionately harm small competitors and thus help monopolies like Google and Facebook that an afford to comply.
I'd put my money on the several states' attorneys general.
That's why I think capitalism needs a mechanism to prevent a scenario of "too big to fail". Companies like Facebook should never be allowed to have their Whatsaps, Instagrams and Apple should be split from Apple Store, Google Search from Ad Sense and Ad Words and Gmail and so on to ensure that there can be competition and a free market on a micro scale. For example a search engine over a certain size should be selling access to an API for displaying ads on the same terms as they would sell it to Ad Sense, so competing advertisers could also use the platform. These companies wouldn't have access to Gmail data as that would be a completely separate company and by law prohibited from sharing any personal data. I also think in general ad targeting beyond certain threshold should be illegal as it is not used for marketing, but to manipulate people into buying products they don't need or want. Ok, enough waffling...
The first part of the first question gets answered in the court room, if it isn't answered by a settlement first.
The second part of the first question has different answers, depending on who you're asking. The dominant position currently is that only anticompetitive things that harm consumers should be illegal. (If you only consume free services like, say, Gmail, by definition you cannot be harmed under this theory.) Less radical theories also hold that the marketplace should be competitive, and there are other theories.
Making patents illegal would be pretty weird, given that a patent is a monopoly that wouldn't exist without government intervention.
That seems like a very circular answer. I'd clarify to say that patents are considered anticompetitive practices. However, they were (as originally envisioned, but certainly not since State Street, possibly earlier) anticompetitive practices that were specifically and purposefully limited in two ways:
1. The filing of a patent requires the filer to disclose the operation of the patented invention such that any art-practiced person could replicate it. Any non-disclosed secrets are protected only under trade-secret law, where the thing is secret only until the secret is out. That's how Coca-Cola has kept the Coke recipe a secret for generations.
2. The patent is enforceable only for a limited period of time (20 years), much like copyright originally was (14x2). Due to innovation pressures, and the fact that companies recognize they build on one anothers' works, that enforcement window hasn't been extended. Instead, companies rely on patent thickets to keep competitors out for the proscribed period of time.
As mentioned above, modern patents aren't actually subject to these limitations. Modern drafting lawyers do everything they can to exclude required information in the patient itself so that it can't be used for reproduction, while still claiming patent enforceability on the result. Additionally, patents are also awarded for a vast array of inventions that would've been previously considered unpatentable descriptions of ideas (software and process patents in particular). See Jefferson (e.g., knowledge and candles) for some of the original reasoning behind the system.
In other words, since there's no billion dollar industry buying laws requiring fewer and smaller patents, the scope of patentability keeps increasing to the benefit of already entrenched players.
I'm sure that helped someone, it isn't different from my answer and you only focused on patents not the "circular answer" for the universe of what the state says is anticompetitive. The real answer is a dissertation on enforcement actions and circuit court behaviors, which I was not going to write and there is no one answer.
Regarding patents, the article of the constitution is an instruction to Congress to secure rights for a "limited time". So maybe you needed to explain that since I guess it isn't common for people to know what the constitution says, in my world I just assume that.
Yeah, I probably should've posted my comment aside your comment instead of in response to it. Regardless, I was trying to draw attention to the tradeoffs involved in the formation of the current system beyond simply saying "that's how it is." Being explicit about how we got here is just as, if not more, important than understanding where we are. It teaches us how the current situation has and might yet change over time.
The government doesn't want to actually debilitate you in an antitrust lawsuit because it could ironically make the nearest competitor a monopoly when your business implodes. Whoopsie! Although monopolies themselves are not illegal as long as anticompetitive practices aren't deployed, the state is still trying to promote competition, and is keen to avoid causing it themselves.
Breaking rules is tight!
There is a book on this reality if you want to read more.