Ask HN: Is Antitrust Mostly a Farce? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is Antitrust Mostly a Farce?

18 pointshuijzer5 comments

I‘m starting to wonder whether most antitrust actions are mostly fake. From the perspective of the government there are many reasons to not take action, namely: great companies can have an enormous upside for countries (e.g., taxes and employment), most companies sell worldwide so downside is shared worldwide (whereas benefits flow mostly to headquarters), too strict actions may hamper innovation by signalling to innovators that you will be punished if you achieve too much, and of course big companies provide personal incentives for politicians to take no action.

So government doesn’t really have much incentive to take action. However they do have incentive to pretend that they take action.

So therefore I suspect that most antitrust is mostly a farce. Any thoughts?

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Governments often behave like gangster syndicates. Not in all cases or in every way, but if you take the premise as given, and then explain apparent deviations as outcomes of internal power struggle or PR campaigns to garner broad support, most things that happen within large governments make some kind of sense, anti-trust included.

Governments will accept and enjoy a monopoly if they get a piece of the pie, but there are usually dissenting interests in the wings saying "your monopoly is stopping us from building OUR monopoly, so knock it off". And then anti-trust can have teeth. Likewise, a monopoly can "rise above" negative public opinion and be forced to legitimacy if it demonstrates that it's serving the interests of power. Or a demographic that was being courted ages out, and suddenly the political mood changes to serve the new set of players and things magically become possible.

But this kind of thing also accounts for why some public investments get lots of funding, while others languish or are captured by do-nothing rentiers. Or why you end up with popular culture being funded within a narrow set of genres and themes. It's a whole oroborous of elite interests making deals to allocate capital, and often pursuing ego gratification along the way.

> great companies can have an enormous upside for countries (e.g., taxes and employment)

A company split into multiple still provides taxes and employment. And the employment conditions tend to improve, since there would be more companies competing for employees.

> too strict actions may hamper innovation by signalling to innovators that you will be punished if you achieve too much

And monopolies hamper innovation by reducing the competitive pressure to innovate. Necessity is the mother of invention.

Let's look at what kind of "innovations" Microsoft used to grow - pushed an over-complicated OOXML standard, and implemented it in their products incorrectly, to make it harder for LibreOffice to interoperate, since they were forced to follow a complex standard and reproduce Microsoft's bugs: https://ploum.net/2023-06-23-how-to-kill-decentralised-netwo...

There are countless similar examples, going back to railroads charging more to carry competitor's goods.

It’s not farce, but it is complicated for some reasons including those you mentioned.

In the US antitrust took a sideways turn when interpretation of the law began to follow the “Chicago school” approach: Essentially that antitrust action was only warranted when harm was done to consumers.

With this approach the burden is far more challenging for government to prove. It seems like consumer harm is low bar, but this is not the court of public opinion, or the court of common sense. It’s the American legal system.

And American law is sufficiently late-stage that it feels like we’re chasing political ideology now instead of justice.

Yeah just look at the recent hunter Biden trial to see what can happen when money and influence gets thrown at the legal system. It’s just systemic corruption through and through, it simply got caught up on one ethical actor so we get to see all the dirty laundry

Matt Stoller writes a lot about Antitrust recently: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/

He often manages to sound hopeful. My cynicism makes me suspect any enforcement actions will tend to work in favor of the centralist forces, somehow.

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