Funny how making books cheap is considered a failing.
Which is why lower consumer prices aren't a valid defence against anti=trust. Nor is the argument that markets "naturally" lead to monopolies or (at best) oligopolies and cartels - even though empirically they do. So much so that setting out to create a monopoly is a bullet point on many unicorn-wannabe business plans.
The problem is abuse of power without oversight.
YouTube can screw over content creators with its insane system of copyright strikes. PayPal and Amazon can keep legitimately earned money on the pretext of non-existent ToC violations. Apple can decide to bar you from the App Store on a whim and clean-room your best green shoots ideas into its own products. Google can decide that you earned too much in ad revenue and shut you down just because it can.
People have lost businesses and livelihoods because of these practices. The monopoly position held by these companies makes them unassailable.
That's what antitrust protection is really about.
https://fee.org/articles/the-myth-that-standard-oil-was-a-pr...
Is it? Or is that what good regulation is for? What if YouTube and their competitors all nerfed and deplatformed popular creators because of advertiser pressures? Isn’t this a better argument for regulation?
Remember that the reason that Bork defined antitrust the way he did was because there wasn’t a methodical definition of where it should be applied in the 60’s, and the govt was arbitrarily interventionist.
Prices didn't go up until the government forced Standard Oil to break up. It had nothing to do with the competition being "crushed"; it had to do with the government taking the attitude you mention, that lower consumer prices didn't matter. Which seems daft since lower consumer prices mean consumers, i.e., the people, are better off.
I don't think that necessarily follows; price is big, but not everything. I don't care how cheap products are on Amazon, I still refuse to buy computer storage or anything that goes in the human body since they are either unwilling or unable to deal with counterfeiting problem.
Standard Oil didn't have a "counterfeiting problem", so I don't see how this is relevant to them. Or, for that matter, to any other large monopoly that has been broken up by antitrust action.
Also, you as a consumer might judge that, for example, you don't trust Amazon to deliver the product you want in a certain area, regardless of how low the price is. That's fine. But that in itself is no argument for breaking up Amazon in an antitrust action. It's just an argument for not trusting Amazon for certain types of products.
It seems like there aren’t any middle-quality products anymore: you can buy a cheap plastic item that never works quite right and will break next month, or you can buy a chrome-plated showpiece item that costs too much. Where’s the non-disposable, ugly, bulletproof utility version these days?
I think there still are, but I agree it's very hard to find any on Amazon, at least in a lot of product categories. You have to spend time trawling actual brick and mortar stores.
==since lower consumer prices mean consumers, i.e., the people, are better off.==
Over what time frame are they better off?
Are workers (also people) better off?
No, but any supposed other benefits that outweigh prices getting higher are even harder to measure, so basing government intervention on them is even harder to justify.
> Over what time frame are they better off?
Um, whatever time frame the prices are lower?
> Are workers (also people) better off?
If they have to spend less on what they need, it would seem so.
“Spend less on what they need” is same Walmart argument we’ve heard for decades. Meanwhile, the middle class shrinks and many of the things people need to improve their lives (shelter, healthcare, education) get more and more expensive and wages stagnate.
The problem is abuse of power without oversight
This is exactly how I feel about me dealing as a business with the big corps. But I did not actually had this experience myself. Reason is simple: I just do not engage. As a business I do not uses any cloudy stuff at all. Everything I do I host either myself or on rented servers that I could change on a moment's notice. No Youtube, no Apple app store, no hosting my software using Azure/Amazon/etc, no Github (I host my own), no Gmail etc.etc.
what's clear, however, is that they use their e-commerce position to also one-up competitors as a retailer. they have access to data about what's hot, what could benefit from a more economic option, etc. which they can use - perhaps anti-competitively (by e.g. intentionally selling at loss to defeat the new competitor).
additionally, their entire cloud computing arm affords them the opportunity to run other parts of their business at a massive loss, perhaps intentionally (again, to defeat competitors) as needed.
as an analogy, imagine if standard oil also had a financial operation that low-balled "normal" banks, intentionally losing money on every loan or instrument, just so those other banks blew up.
Now, French book-sellers, on the other hand, appreciate the law that keeps them in business for aesthetic reasons, whether or not it makes economic sense or they can stay financially competitive when the price of data transmission has crashed past too-small-to-meter-per-word.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/20/opinion/paul-krugman-amaz...