Congress Gets Ready to Smash Big Tech Monopolies

In a similar discussion yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24697860) many seem to pass easily over the basic fact that monopolies are wrong, whatever your political/economic leaning is. I commented:

In economic theory, a well-functioning market is a market where no single actor can manipulate prices all by itself. That's why monopolies (oligopolies - monopsonies) are fundamentally bad.

In some situations where a monopoly makes sense (there is no sense in having 2 autonomous rail systems for instance), typically for infrastructures, there are strong provisions to be applied to keep the monopoly in control. Historically, these monopolies were often simply managed by a publicly-owned company (USPS, or interstate highways, for instance).

As I said in another comment, there is no rational way to defend or explain away monopolies. If you're a free-market capitalist, then you want a functioning free market, thus no monopolies. If you're a socialist, you want them publicly-owned and democratically controlled.

Large powerful monopolies are a tremendous menace to democracy, simple as that. It's not a question of their CEOs being nice people or not, it's deeply ingrained in the logic of being a monopoly.