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The focus of antitrust on prices is the direct result of Bork's influence on the Supreme Court, as this excellent article makes clear [1]:

>And so Bork argued that federal judges must resolve the “paradox” by declaring that the only legitimate purpose of antitrust law was to promote “consumer welfare,” basically meaning lower prices. And the only way to promote consumer welfare was to promote efficiency, because efficiency meant more production, which meant cheaper products. Any other purpose would interfere with efficiency and must therefore be ignored.

>To see how radical this was, just consider one example of something not captured by consumer welfare: employee welfare. In a town dominated by a single employer, workers may be forced to submit to poverty wages and abusive work conditions. Coal miners know this all too well—so do Walmart employees. (See Alec MacGillis, “What J. D. Vance Doesn’t Get About Appalachia.”) But to Bork, that could never justify antitrust enforcement so long as the product stayed cheap.

>The Antitrust Paradox makes for remarkable reading today. Like a caricature of a Chicago School economist, Bork explicitly warned against learning from experience. Rather, all business practices should be judged based on what “simple” (his word) economic models predict. “Only theory can separate the competitive from the anticompetitive,” he wrote. And theory says consolidation is good, because it means strong firms are crushing weak ones.

[1] https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novemberdecember-2017...

thanks for that article. this was the money quote for me:

"... a central riddle of the 2000s: from 1999 to 2009, the economy had added zero new jobs. Even before the real estate bubble burst, growth was historically weak. Explanations like technology and offshoring didn’t quite add up.

Longman and Lynn had a novel theory: the rise in corporate consolidation was the culprit. Small businesses drive most job creation in the U.S. A monopoly, meanwhile, has little reason to hire more workers, because it can just charge higher prices."

people who talk about automation taking jobs being the problem or universal basic income being the answer should take heed of this, the central economic issue underlying today's societal and political challenges.

monopolies are anti-capitalist.

I think it's the most pressing political issue right now.

Monopolies are not anti-capitalist; they are the natural result of unregulated capitalism.

it's well-accepted that monopolized markets are undesireable in capitalism, so i don't think it's wrong to state it as anti-capitalist. but let's leave the semantics aside.

strictly speaking, unregulated markets don't have to devolve into monopoly, but functional markets are not particularly stable on their own, so monopoly does tend to be a common result. it's like a dipolar chaotic system where the second pole is stronger than the first--once the system flips to the second pole, it's hard to get it back.

even regulated markets can devolve into monopoly, as we all well know just by looking around. the early 20th century compromise was to allow monopolies to form but strongly regulate them. over time, we've allowed moneyed interests to weaken those regulations, with the entirely predictable result of the current imbalance of wealth distribution and social unrest.

Points taken. Well-said.

> Monopoly regulators look at consumer harm, with US regulators focusing on price.

I was under the impression for US regulators it was about unfair intentional competition stifling (for different values of "fair" than EU definitions).

> GDPR making more sense now?

Not exactly. One might expect more active measures if inability to compete was the motive. GDPR, despite my issues with it personally, appears intended to prevent data misuse regardless of company size. Granted skeptics view it as a lance to joust large US companies with. But EU has laws on the books to punish companies misusing their size.

In the EU, rulings taken collectively begin to feel like punishment is just for being a certain size. But in theory, neither side of the ocean makes it illegal to just be big and good at what you do.

The paradox is that environments where competitors organically grow most of the time are the same ones where monopolies grow too. You can't really build a healthy private sector via legislation alone, much less so if the legislation favors consumers over businesses in an unbalanced way.

> That for example (as the article notes) is why Facebook, Google etc are not seen as monopolies because they charge consumers zero.

I can see this point, but also the point that many consumers consider the collection of data about them amounts to a cost, given our current system. (e.g. there's a new, expensive risk for the consumer: suppose that Facebook's systems are hacked and otherwise private data related to security questions, location, income, gender and so on are used to help steal the consumer's identity)

I mean, does economics need to catch up here? Can we really say there's "no cost" to the consumer?

That is the entire argument of the Hipster Antitrust

Could you clarify? This reads as snark.

> you can see how network effects keep making Amazon more and more efficient

If we were in court, the argument that you just gave would be used by the amazon lawyers, in defense of why they shouldn't be regulated.

Networks effects are a good thing. Making companies more and more efficient is a good thing. Cheaper goods and services are a good thing.

I have yet to see anyone bring up any arguments as for why any of these things hurt consumers.

In order for me to support regulation, I want to see actual consumers being harmed, and for the things you mentioned, such as efficiency, to be protected and encouraged, instead of discouraged.

Monopolies are rents, in the sense that a network effect isn't something that the company built, but is surplus value it's gained access to and can extract. The situation is exceedingly path dependent and often rewards little other than luck or ruthlessness, with monopolists retaining value not by continuing to innovate, but by choking off, buying, or outright killing competitors.

Why do the consumers deserve government subsidy to protect them against negative effects of monopolies, but not employees or small business owners?

Well for one, the government isnt subsidizing anything. They are instead allowing customers to do what they want with their money.

And 2, I don't care what happens to business owners. They are wealthy enough to handle themselves. (Yes, if you are even a small business owner, that still counts as "wealthy" in my book. Most people don't own much of anything)

And 3, we are talking about a product monopoly, and not an employment monopoly. Nobody has shown any evidence that Amazon has any sort of monopoly on hiring people. People are instead arguing that they have a monopoly on the markets that they sell in.

Consumers deserve the protections because they are much less well off than either large or small companies.

You don't need the government for that - you just let people do whatever they want. Any sort of anti-monopoly legislation is a subsidy in a sense, because it gives those protected some degree of economic power that they wouldn't otherwise have, enabling them to make better deals etc. And there's nothing wrong with that in principle, if you believe in common good - but then the question of scope arises.

And we're talking about all kinds of monopolies. The effect that Amazon has is not so much on its own employees (although there are some obvious issues there as well), but on employees of all the competitors that it puts out of business. All those people also benefit from the lower prices that Amazon offers - but that is more than offset by the loss of income. It's kinda like Walmart - it's more affordable, but at the cost of making a lot of people poorer such that they need that high affordability. For the owners, it's a win-win, of course, because it creates a lock-in. But I don't see why we should accept that as a society.