I wish more people knew the basic economic theory of monopolies. Because virtually all common public arguments, including yours, show abysmal misunderstanding of the issues.

First let's start with something that your article got right.

Virtually every monopoly is worth more in pieces than it is together. That is because maintaining the monopoly requires having profitable parts of the business subsidize other parts which are running at at unprofitable prices to shut down potential competition. The result is the sum of the pieces of monopolies that were divided by law were worth more than the original monopoly was. And THAT means that a divided monopoly almost immediately COSTS consumers more.

So, as your article concludes, saving consumers money in the short run is not a reason to shut down monopolies.

This immediately raises the question of why monopolies come around. If a monopoly is worth less than separate companies, why make one? The answer is that a monopoly is worth less than the entire area of business that it would monopolize, but it is worth more than any individual piece of that business. Therefore creating a monopoly is personally profitable to the one who does.

OK, with that out of the way, why should we object to monopolies? The answer is simple. Monopolies are about establishing control. In the area that is controlled, the monopoly can make any unilateral decision that it wants. This is really, really bad for innovation. Innovation requires many different players trying many different things.

With innovation, in time it is quite possible for consumers to get both better features and more competitive pricing than the monopoly would have managed. Getting rid of the monopoly is essentially always bad for consumers in the short run. But the long run could be a different story?

As a concrete example, one contributor to the dot com boom was that the web offered a way to create businesses that Microsoft's monopoly could not squish.

As another example, before the breakup of Bell Telephone, customers couldn't even choose what color they wanted for their phone! If they had not been broken up then it is unlikely that we'd have seen the rapid spread and improvement in things like smartphones.

The long and short of it is that we should expect (relatively) cheap prices from a monopoly. And saving money is not reason to break one up. Our areas of concern should be continued innovation and availability of customer features.