This is an interesting angle. Are there examples of it actually happening?
Unlike what the other commenter said... there are plenty of historical examples.
> The most notorious of the trusts were the Sugar Trust, the Whisky Trust, the Cordage Trust, the Beef Trust, the Tobacco Trust, John D. Rockefeller's Oil Trust (Standard Oil of New Jersey), and J. P. Morgan's Steel Trust (U.S. Steel Corporation).
Some dominant companies of course emerged in that era, but I'd be interested to see evidence that companies that weren't insulated from competition by government policies actually used their dominance to harm consumers.
Also, the fact that some companies became very dominant doesn't mean ipso facto that they harmed consumers. If a company becomes huge fair and square (as opposed to via regulatory capture or other coercive means), it may just mean that people like their product the best.
Those didn't exist in the 1800s. The rise of the corporation occurred after the 1830s, when Congress no longer had to approve of every single company's existence.
After that, it was Laissez-faire economics for over 50 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laissez-faire ... basically ending with the Sherman Anti-Trust Act when Americans realized that was a bad idea.
http://ncpedia.org/united-states-v-american-tobacco-co
> protected by tariffs
Globalization wasn't a big thing in the 1800s. US Companies basically only had to worry about other US Companies. There was some foreign trade, but not much.
Within the US, a major entity like the Tobacco Trust had the power to set prices. When you're the only company in the entire US, you have the ability to stomp out competition like that.
I could see something like this being an interesting This American Life story.
Hotels, Transportation etc.
Why do you think it costs Uber $1.2 billion in losses just to survive?
Nothing special about ISPs.
See Phone Service and Electricity.
The issue with natural-monopolies is that when one company starts serving a neighborhood, it makes no sense for a 2nd company to start serving the same neighborhood. That's just wasteful.
So there are huge amounts of Verizon-only neighborhoods or Comcast-only neighborhoods out there.
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Other countries solve this by highly regulating the "natural monopoly" part. IE: If you are going to lay wires to a neighborhood, you become subject to strict regulations. (Ex: utility).
Then, they force you to provide multiple choices. The deregulation of power companies for example allows me to pick a blend-of-energy, or I can pay a little bit more for clean energy providers.
Similarly, if we turn Comcast into a government-regulated utility (aka: accept the fact that it will always monopolize a neighborhood), and then force it to supply multiple ISPs in its pipes, things would probably get better.
My county actually has this deregulation, but it doesn't seem to work in practice because Comcast is both cheaper and got better customer service than the other ISPs that run on Comcast's networks.
Arguably, it forces Comcast to have better customer service. Because they're actually competing in my area. I actually go with Verizon in my neighborhood though.
Then a little thing called the "GPS" was invented. Uber takes advantage of the GPS and anybody can now plot a course to anywhere without specialist knowledge of a city.
The strange thing is, people seem to have forgotten what life was like before GPS.
In Vienna (Austria), taxi drivers had to pass a pretty tough exam which required intimate knowledge of the cities streets.
A good driver still makes a difference in the age of GPS, because you can often safe quite some time by avoiding certain points of congestion and factoring in traffic.
But with GPS that incorporates (live) traffic data, the additional value is a lot smaller.
The day that ends, it will be back to business.
Think of Uber as a taxi company subsidizing your travel for a few years. Things will be back to normal once the VC realizes they can't make profits until they charge customers like other taxi companies.
By the way, according to the article, Uber is roughly breaking even in the US (lost some money last quarter, made money the quarter before).
Rockefeller Oil, J.P. Morgan Steel / US Steel, Tobacco Trust, etc. etc. These companies monopolized the industry in the late 1800s and fixed-prices to kill competitors.
One example was (and maybe still is), to ban discounts on textbooks, as the big margins were a big reason small bookstores stayed afloat.
Another was is to limit hours of operations in stores, including making stores be closed on sunday being mandatory, as many family retailers just couldn't man the store without hiring someone, and labor laws made hiring someone for little time expensive.
There was also a semi-recent outcry when the government stopped regulating rent hikes. for commercial property. There were plenty of stores in highly desirable locations that were on the same lease for a century! Their monthly rent could be two orders of magnitude away from the space next door.
Such level of protectionism of old business models just means that instead of going through pain and optimization for decades, they all get wiped off the map in one fell swoop the minute competition that can skirt the protectionist regulations comes in: Imagine what happens to tiny stores when, instead of first having to compete with US levels of efficiency in big box stores, they get to compete with Amazon. What happens to record stores that can get away with selling music for 25+ euros an album when spotify shows up?
So, while there is reason in fearing monopolies, the levels of regulation I describe just have little to do with what the US calls anti monopoly regulation.